Color Management
And this brings us to modern CIE-based color management.
CIE XYZ is used by Acrobat[md]and pretty much everyone else[md]as the intermediate color space in converting color intended for one device to color intended for another. The idea is to store colors within a document as XYZ values; when that document is opened on any computer, that machine’s system software uses the color profile for its display to convert each of the document’s XYZ values to whatever RGB comes closest to those perceived colors (Figure 3). When you print the document, the system will use the printer’s color profile to convert each XYZ to a matching CMYK.
Figure 3 Color management systems use color profiles to convert a document’s XYZ-based colors to RGB values appropriate to each display device.