The same colours, from your screen to the press

What a colour profile is, in one minute

Start with the job in hand: a leaflet, a catalogue cover, a set of labels, going out to a printing works. Inside the document, a colour is nothing but a handful of numbers. On their own those numbers say very little — the same ones are one red on your phone, another red on the screen beside it, and a third red once the ink has dried on paper. A colour profile is the small file that says what those numbers are meant to look like in real life. Its full name is an ICC profile, after the body that settled how such a file is written.

A printing works knows which profile its presses are set to, and will give you its name if you ask for it. Put that file into your document and nobody down the line has to guess: the blue you chose is the blue that comes back.

A profile written into a document to say which device its colours were chosen for is called the output intent. That is the piece the printing works looks for, and the piece the rules on documents kept for the long term insist on.

The profile that travels in your document is yours

The engine carries one profile of its own, the ordinary screen one, and it works that one out from its published definition rather than copying anybody's file. Every other profile in the world belongs to whoever measured the press or the screen it describes, and each comes with a licence of its own. Handing you a folder of them would put somebody else's terms inside every document you ever make.

So you bring the profile your printing works gave you, the engine writes it into your document, and it travels with that document wherever the document goes. The list that counts is your printing works' list, and it is the one you work to.

The profiles that were taken right through

On 28 July 2026 the team took 26 of the profiles the trade actually uses, one at a time, and put each of them through the whole chain: read the profile and see how many inks or colours it describes, set it on a document as its output intent, write the document as a PDF/A-3, then open that document again and check the profile really is inside it, whole, describing the same inks or colours it started with.

Every document that came out was then handed to veraPDF, the free checker archives use. It knows nothing about what wrote the file in front of it, and answers pass or fail. Twenty-three of the 26 describe a printer or a screen, they are the ones a document came out of, and all 23 passed. The other three describe a camera: the engine turns those away at the call, before a byte is written, so the checker never saw one.

The 23 that are accepted

Each of these went in, came back out whole, and the document it produced was passed by the checker. Open the list and look for the name your printing works gave you. If it is not there, send it to us and we will put it through.

What else goes through, and what became of the files

The profiles that come with the free printing software go through as well, every one of them.

Not one of those files stayed. Each was fetched, put through the check and deleted. Nothing belonging to anybody else went into the engine, and nothing of the sort is shipped to you.

The 3 that are refused, and why refusing is the right answer

Three are turned away, and all three are camera profiles: the one for HD video, the one for NTSC video and the one for PAL video. They are not the PAL/SECAM screen profile listed above, which is accepted. They describe a machine that reads colour — a camera, a scanner — rather than a machine that shows it to you or prints it.

The standard for documents kept for the long term, ISO 19005-3, asks in its clause 6.2.3 for the profile of a printer or of a screen. A reading machine's profile is neither, so a document resting on one is not the archival document it says it is.

The engine stops at once and says in plain words what the profile it was handed actually describes. A refusal you understand on the spot is worth a great deal more than a file that fails somewhere else, weeks later.

Check it yourself, on your own profiles

Send us your own profiles and we will put them through. Whoever looks after your computers can also run the check themselves, from the engine's own source tree with a build chain in place: it goes through a folder of profiles one by one and says, for each, whether it is accepted and what it describes. It needs no outside checker to do it.

Where this shows up in your day

If your documents go to a printing works, this is the difference between the first sample off the press coming back right and it coming back twice. If you keep documents to be reopened decades from now, it is the difference between a file an archive takes and a file it sends back.

It costs nothing extra. It is the same engine, and it is in every offer.

See it on a finished document

A file that states the device its colours are meant for A sheet as it goes to the press What else a document kept for the long term has to carry The checker that ruled on all twenty-six of them

See the prices See the examples