Thread: Colour Engines

The colour engine or Colour Management Module (CMM - Corel define this as Color Matching Module) is the piece of software that makes the calculations required to convert a colour image from one colour device and its associated colour space to another. These conversions are performed via the reference colour space. To make the conversion the colour engine uses the reference space, the source and destination colour space, the asso¬ciated input and output device profiles and the users choice of rendering intent. Because of the complexity of the calculations involved and a variety of methods for exactly how the transformations are performed, there are a number of different colour engines in use.



Some image editing software provides a choice of which colour engine or CMM.use. For example by left clicking on the central colour icon in the colour management control panel in CorelDRAW (X3 or X4) the user has the choice of either the Kodak Digital Science or
Microsoft ICM 2.0 CMMs. With Microsoft Vista there is also the additional choice of microsoft WCS. in Adobe Phto shop, opening the colour Settings control panel the
menu ([ Shift + ] + [ Ctrl] + [ K] ) with the More Options button selected Conversion Options - Engine, allows the user to choose either Adobe (ACE)
or Microsoft ICM. Differences in the algo¬rithms used in different colour engines, coupled with the use of different reference colour spaces can result in visible differences in edited images when the same source file is processed by different image editing software.