Different types of ICC color correction profiles
When creating ICC profiles for recent model printers we create a couple different sets of profiles for different use cases
General Purpose Profiles
The profiles that we publish on our website are all what we call "general purpose profiles".
That is to say, they are optimized to work well under a variety of lighting conditions for a wide range of use cases.
This is especially important with respect to papers that have fluorescent whitening agents as they shift toward blue in the presence of UV light.
Our general purpose profiles need to look good both with and without UV light present and under both daylight and warm lighting, since we cant know the viewing conditions of the final print hanging on a customers wall we assume a moderate color temperate of 5000K and a moderate amount of UV light will be present (D50 / M1 conditions). This both gives the best overall results in our own internal testing and is the current FOGRA recommendation for general purpose profiles.
Our general purpose profiles are primarily designed for printing photos and artworks using Relative Colorimetric or Perceptual rendering intents.
The downside of the general purpose profiles is that if you are trying to do exact color matching on a paper with optical brighteners, you need to carefully control the UV light present in your environment to match D50 viewing conditions. This usually means using an expensive professional viewing booth. Of course, even if you match the prints exactly under correct D50 lighting conditions, for that to mean anything you need to be able to control the lighting wherever the print is displayed, something that is not realistic for the vast majority of situations. Using any 5000K light source and maybe the curtains open so that a little UV light comes in will be close enough of a color match for the vast majority people.
On papers without optical brighteners, these profiles are designed to work with paper color. So, for example, if you choose a warm-toned cotton paper like our Aurora Art Natural then you will get warm whites and neutrals in your print.
For most people with most use cases, our general purpose profiles are what you want.
DESIGN Profiles
In addition to our general purpose profiles, we offer special profiles that are mostly useful to graphic designers and artists working in fields where exact color accuracy is more important than overall contrast we offer a special set of ICC profiles with the word DESIGN in the name.
These differ from our general purpose profiles in a couple of important ways.
Most importantly, they are intended for color matching under D50M2 (5000K, no UV light present) lighting conditions. It is easy to obtain affordable and high quality 5000K light LED fixtures that omit UV light, such as many of the offerings from Waveform Lighting. This allows designers, especially ones working with brand colors or artwork reproductions, to color match their prints without needing an expensive viewing booth. It is worth noting that if the paper has optical brighteners, the prints will only have the correct colors when there is no UV light present. This is especially useful when you want to do hard proofing before sending a file off to a commercial print lab.
Our DESIGN profiles are for use with the Absolute Colorimetric rendering intent. Compared to our general purpose profiles, this can result in reduced contrast, clipped highlights, clipped blacks, and clipped saturated colors especially on matte papers. The tradeoff is printing colors as accurately as possible, without regard to the limits of the paper. This will also attempt to use tricks of human vision (and a bit extra ink) to ensure true neutrals, even if the paper is not a true neutral color.
It's worth noting that the Perceptual and Saturation rendering intents for our Design profiles do not function as a normal. They will behave as other experimental rendering intents - typically "Absolute Appearance" - but this can vary by profile. Feel free to experiment with these as you like.
We also push the quality up to maximum when computing the DESIGN profiles. While we do 'highest' quality rendering for our general purpose profiles, our DESIGN profiles are pushed up one notch beyond highest, to 'ultimate'.
Our DESIGN profiles are also made to work well with the Spot Matching System (SMS) from Spot Nordic: https://www.spot-nordic.com/sms/
this allows designers and digital artists to work with a color palette that is proven to be accurate across a wide range of media.
Currently, access to DESIGN profiles is limited to customers purchasing custom ICC profiles and Print Services Providers.
We will open up a way to get access to these profiles as part of a bundle with the Spot Matching System palette sometime in the future.
SMS Profiles
For some select models of printer and papers, we offer DESIGN profiles that have been carefully tuned to the exact color palettes of the Spot Matching System (SMS) from Spot Nordic: https://www.spot-nordic.com/sms/
These profiles have SMS in the file name.
These profiles offer the absolute highest possible accuracy for exactly the colors contained in the SMS color palettes (and reduced accuracy for colors outside of these color palettes)
For these profiles, we offer full reports showing exactly what to expect with each SMS color on a particular printer+paper combination.
These profiles are primarily useful for graphic design and digital art where you need to ensure that colors will be accurate across a wide range of media - especially, for example, when using a desktop home printer for hard proofing before sending off to a print lab or using in other media such as broadcast television.
Like our DESIGN profiles, SMS profiles are computed using 'ultimate' quality settings (this takes our computer around an hour of number-crunching to compute - per profile!)
Currently, access to SMS profiles is limited to customers purchasing custom ICC profiles and Print Services Providers.
We will open up a way to get access to these profiles as part of a bundle with the Spot Matching System palette sometime in the future.
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Last updated: October 21, 2025
