ICC holds Color Experts Day in Tokyo; applauds Microsoft support of ICC in WCS
The ICC met recently in Tokyo, Japan where the group elected Mr. William Li, Color Systems Engineer of Kodak Graphic Communications Group as Chair and Mr. Jack Holm, Principal Color Scientist in HP's Office of Strategy & Technology as Vice-Chair. Mr. Phil Green of the London College of Communication will continue to serve as Technical Secretary and Mr. William K. "Kip" Smythe of NPES will continue as Administrative Secretary.
A new steering committee took office at the meeting. The steering committee is comprised of representatives from the five founding members of the ICC: Agfa, Apple Computer, Adobe Systems, Eastman Kodak and Sun Microsystems, and 11 regular members: Canon Development Americas, Color Savvy Systems, Fuji Photo Film, GretagMacbeth, Heidelberger Druckmaschinen, Hewlett Packard, Lexmark International CPD, Onyx Graphics, Quebecor World, X-rite and Xerox.
The sixty-seven member companies of the ICC worldwide elect the steering committee to represent the broad range of industries that the ICC serves, from its roots in graphic arts and photography, to its newer involvement in support of the motion picture industry transition to digital.
With the ICC meeting, the ICC and its host, Fuji Photo Film, held the first Japan-ICC Experts Session on color management. The session was attended by technical experts from Japanese, US, and European corporations. Session topics included color management for new display technologies and soft proofing, digital camera raw files and high-fidelity capture, printing and OS integration, digital motion picture production, and next generation color management system architectures and workflows.
In addition, the ICC began development of guidelines for implementation and use of ICC profiles with the new Microsoft WindowsTM Color System (WCS). When it is launched with the Microsoft VistaTM operating system, WCS will for the first time bring Version 4 ICC support to a Microsoft OS. The ICC has prepared an introductory white paper outlining various ICC color management approaches, providing a first look at using ICC profiles on the VistaTM OS. The white paper is available for downloading from the ICC web site at http://www.color.org/ICC_white_paper_24_ICCandWCS.pdf.
The International Color Consortium was established in 1993 by eight industry vendors for the purpose of creating, promoting and encouraging the standardization and evolution of an open, vendor-neutral, cross-platform color management system architecture and components. The outcome of this co-operation was the development of the ICC profile specification. The ICC specification V4 is now widely used and is referred to in many international and other de-facto standards. It has recently been approved as an International Standard, ISO 15076. ICC currently has 70 members.
For more information, contact Administrative Secretary William K. Smythe at 703/264-7200 or e-mail ksmythe@npes.org.
