In working environments where color management is used, objects in PDF documents can be tagged with ICC profiles. An ICC profile is a description of the color space related to a specific device. ICC profiles help you reproduce colors accurately across different platforms, devices and ICC-compliant software programs.
Suppose you use a digital camera to take pictures. If you want to make sure that the colors in these pictures are displayed consistently on a specific monitor, you can tag the images with an ICC profile of your digital camera. The images then get a detailed mathematical description of how your digital camera “saw” the colors at the moment when you took the pictures. A color management system can use this description to convert the colors to the color space of another output device, such as a monitor. In that case, the colors seen through the lens of your digital camera and the colors displayed by your monitor will look (almost) identical.