A system design for color conversions

Jobs to be printed may have colors that are specified in many different color spaces. A printing system must convert those colors to the device CMYK of the printer. In complex printing environments, color conversions occur at many places throughout the system. In an Advanced Function Presentation (AFP) printing environment, data is processed on application development tools, in the print server, and in the printer itself. Further, there are different types of data formats, such as PostScript format and AFP Mixed Object Document Content Architecture (MO:DCA-P) format, which require color conversions by different processes. It is particularly important to produce consistent colors across all data paths for both device-dependent and device-independent colors. The system designers must decide which input color spaces to support. For instance, support may be needed for some device-dependent color spaces such as CMYK SWOP, CMYK Euroscale, and SMPTE-C RGB that have become industry "standards". There may be requirements to support a toner-saving mode. This article will describe some of the work that was done during the development of a high-end, full-color printing system. It will discuss methods used to make the color conversions more consistent and multiple methods that may be used to control color conversions.