Color Space vs. ICC Profile

[dgood]

Hello,
I was looking for a good answer to the question, "What is the difference between Color Space and an ICC Profile?"
I found this answer, which I thought I'd post here in case it can help anyone else.

There is some ambiguity in the terms. I'll try to address what I think is the most common use:

An ICC Profile is a file created for a specific device.
It describes how the device captures or renders colors. If you imagine colors in an Red/Green/Blue (RGB) space, you can picture a 3d cube, say Red=X, Blue=Y, Green=Z. In an ideal world every device would capture and render a perfect cube of color, but that's not the case. Some devices don't capture a certain color as well as others, and so their custom ICC profiles can indicate this.
These profiles are used to try and get accurate looking colors when capturing or rendering images.

An ICC color space is similar, as it defines acceptable colors.
The thing is that it's more a generic profile, like AdobeRGB, sRGB or ProPhoto.
For example, AdobeRGB was designed to represent colors available to most CMYK printers, but not a specific one.
These are used when editing an image to try and keep the colors within the allowable range, and also serve as a form of reference between systems.

So, your monitor, camera, and printer may all have a custom ICC profile that the system uses to make colors as accurate as possible.
While editing an image, a program like Photoshop will use something like sRGB, AdobeRGB, sRGB, ProPhoto colorspace as a working space while editing.

A color profile, or a color space, really the same thing: A way of representing a range of colors. Some are specific to a device like your printer, others are theoretical like AdobeRGB.

Note that sometimes monitors may advertise they are close to sRGB or AdobeRGB display, meaning they can render all the colors within those color spaces.

https://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/3968696#forum-post-57302887