Legacy Document

Inside Macintosh: Advanced Color Imaging on the Mac OS /

Chapter 6 - Developing ColorSync-Supportive Device Drivers / About ColorSync-Supportive Device Driver Development

Devices and Color Management Modules

Your device driver can use the color conversion functions, described in "ColorSync Manager Reference for Applications and Device Drivers" in Advanced Color Imaging Reference, to convert colors between color spaces belonging to the same base family without relying on a CMM. However, color matching, gamut checking, providing color rendering dictionaries to PostScript printers, and other tasks you perform using the ColorSync Manager functions all require use of a CMM. It is the CMM that actually carries out the work of the ColorSync Manager functions, for example, performing the low-level calculations required to match colors from a source device to a destination device.

If your ColorSync-supportive device driver can use the Apple-supplied default CMM, you only need to provide one or more profiles for your device. However, you may want to provide a custom CMM that is optimized for your device and its profiles. For example, a profile can provide private tags containing information a custom CMM might use to achieve better results for the device.

If you provide your own CMM, you can create it or obtain one from a vendor. For information describing how to create a CMM, see "Developing Color Management Modules" (page 5-3) in this book and "ColorSync Manager Reference for Color Management Modules" (page 4-3) in Advanced Color Imaging Reference.