Windows 95 includes Image Color Matching (ICM) support, enabling applications to offer better consistency between the color of images displayed on the screen and the color of images generated by an output device. The technology supporting ICM is licensed from Eastman Kodak.
ICM provides consistent, predictable color rendering from input, through monitor preview, to output. Applications that use ICM functionality enable portability of color information across applications, manipulating the graphic information; across users, providing consistent use of colors; and across platforms, allowing color information to easily be moved to different systems where the ICM technology has been implemented.
The key to ICM support is the use of a profile, which represents the color properties of a monitor, printer, or scanner device. The ICM profile, provided by its vendor as part of the software for the particular monitor, printer, or scanner, resides in the Windows SYSTEM\COLOR directory. The profile used by the ICM support in Windows 95 is the result of an industry consortium called InterColor 3.0, made up of many industry hardware vendors (including Kodak, Microsoft, Apple Computer, Sun Microsystems, and Silicon Graphics, among others) and industry standard-setting bodies. The InterColor group has established a consistent cross-platform color standardization process, including industry-wide standards for defining ICM properties of output and display devices.
Because Windows 95 includes ICM support as part of the operating system, application vendors can integrate ICM functionality into their applications, and thus take advantage of this new system service. To provide support for device-independent color matching, colors used in applications are tied to international (CIE-based) colorimetric standards, rather than in device-dependent form to specific hardware devices. The operating system then performs the appropriate color transformations to map the device-independent color representations to the colors supported by the physical device.