Getting and installing ICC profiles

This article is part of the Tips & Tricks series.

Installation • Usage • PDF issues • Other

System Requirements

You'll need LittleCMS installed on your system. From the top menu bar, please go to the Help menu and select About Scribus. The splash screen will display with the infos on compiled version of Scribus. This should be followed by the 3 letters C-C-T that stands for the library support. If one letter is missing, ie. replaced by a *, it means it's not installed. C=Cups, C=LittleCMS, T=TIFF support. If you find out, that Littlecms is missing, you'll have to install it first together with its development libraries.

Getting ICC profiles

Adobe has released under very liberal licensing terms a group of CMYK press icm profiles. These would be a good beginning default set of press profiles for Scribus if you are planning to send Scribus files (PS or PDF) to a commercial printer. These profiles include US, European and Japanese press defaults. http://download.adobe.com/pub/adobe/iccprofiles/win/AdobeICCProfiles.zip

From the European Color Initiative (ECI) you can get some brand new ISO 12647-2 compliant ICC profiles for offset printing output on. They should reflect the capabilities of modern printing processes, but you have to check with your print shop. ECI Offset Color Standards

Installing ICC profiles

• As user root, copy your ICC profiles into the $prefix/lib/scribus/profiles directory, where $prefix on most systems will be /usr or /usr/local

• You need a minimum of 1 RGB color space icc profile and 1 CMYK icc color space profile for the color managment options to be enabled.

• Launch scribus, choose from the menu Settings>Color Management and check the Activate Color Management checkbox. Done.