A 'very informative' and useful series of articles. Reprinted with authorization from Image Specialists.

• Hue (H) refers to the basic color in terms of one or two dominant primary colors (red, or blue-green, for example). It is measured as a position on the standard color wheel, and is described as an angle between 0 to 360 degrees.
• Saturation (S), also called Chroma, refers to the intensity of the dominant colors. It is measured from 0 to 100 percent: at 0% the color would contain no hue and would be gray, at 100%, the color is fully saturated. 
• Brightness (B) refers to the colors proximity to white or black, which is a function of the amplitude of the light that stimulates the eye's receptors. It is also measured as a percentage: if any hue has a brightness of 0%, it becomes black; with 100% it becomes fully light. 

RGB (Red, Green, Blue) and CMYK (Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black) are other common color models. CRT monitors use the former, in a system of additive color, creating color by causing red, green, and blue phosphors to glow. By mixing varying amounts of each of the red, green or blue, different colors are created, and each can be measured in a scale from 0 to 255. If all red, green and blue are set to 0, the color is black; if they are set to 255, the color is white.

In printing, the pigments in the ink absorb light selectively so that only parts of the spectrum are reflected back to the viewer's eye; hence the term subtractive color. The basic printing ink colors are cyan, magenta, and yellow; and a fourth ink, black, is usually added to create purer, deeper shadows and a wider range of shades. By using varying amounts of these "process" colors a large number of different colors can be produced. Here the level of ink is measured from 0% to 100%; orange, for example being represented by 0% cyan, 50% magenta, 100% yellow and 0% black. 

The CIE (Commission Internationale de l'Eclairage), which was formed early in the last century to develop standards for the specifications of light and illumination, defined the first color space model. This model describes color as a combination of three axes: x, y, and z. In broad terms, x represents the amount of redness in a color, y the amount of greenness and lightness (bright-to-dark), and z the amount of blueness. In 1931 this system was adopted as the CIE x*y*z model, and it is the foundation most other color-space models. The most familiar refinement is the Yxy model; in which the near triangular xy planes represent colors with the same lightness, with lightness varying along the Y-axis. Subsequent developments, such as the L*a*b and L*u*v models released in 1978, map the distances between color coordinates more accurately to the human color perception system.

In printing, for color is to be an effective tool, one must be able to create and enforce consistent, predictable color throughout the production chain: scanners, software, monitors, desktop printers, external PostScript output devices, pre-press service bureaus, and printing presses. The dilemma is that different devices are simply not capable of creating the identical range of colors. That's where color management comes in, whereby the device-independent CIE color space to mediate between the color gamut of the various devices. Color management systems are based on generic profiles of different color devices, which describe imaging technology, gamut and operational methods. These profiles are then fine-tuned by calibrating actual devices to measure and correct any deviations from ideal performance. Finally, colors are translated from one device to another, with mapping algorithms choosing the optimal replacements for out-of-gamut colors that can't be handled.

Until Apple introduced ColorSync as a part of its System 7.x operating system in 1992, color management was left to specific applications. These high-end systems have produced impressive results, but the process is computationally intensive and the devices are mutually incompatible. Recognizing the problems of cross-platform color, the ICC (International Color Consortium, originally known as the ColorSync Profile Consortium) was formed in March 1994 to establish a common device profile formats. The founding companies included Adobe, Agfa, Apple, Kodak, Microsoft, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems, and Taligent.

The goal of the ICC is to provide true portable color that will work in all hardware and software environments, and it published its first standard, Version 3 of the ICC Profile Format, in June 1994. There are two parts to the ICC profile; information about the profile itself, such as what device created the profile and when, and a colorimetric device characterization, which explains how the device renders color. The following year Windows 95 became the first Microsoft operating environment to include color management and support for ICC-compliant profiles, via the ICM (Image Color Management) system.

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