dude, ICC files basically make sure your prints and monitor display are neutral without weird color shifts. you’ve got one for your printer, now grab a display calibration device to sort out your monitor. it’s all about that accurate color matching.

Ok, thanks guys. So I now realize that there’s essentially a common representation (‘neutral’ in the above comment) that the ICC files will transform to. And I see the need to do this transformation for both printer and monitor.

I’ll play around a bit and see where it gets me. Thanks again for the step forward!

I would like my monitor to accurately reflect the print I’ll see on paper.

There is a lot that needs to go into that, so we’ll come back to that.

The ICC profile for a specific paper, on your specific model of printer, with the specific inks designed for your printer (not 3rd party ink as that will change the colors), and with the specific settings that come along with the ICC profile will make it so that when your printer says “This area is THIS specific color of teal and that area is THAT specific orange” the printer will do it’s best to make that happen to THIS teal and THAT orange are produced on the paper. (there’s a bit with gamuts, color adaptation, and rendering intents… but for now stick with perceptual or relative color metric and they’ll be close without having added headaches to avoid that absolute calorimetric brings)

Now you want to calibrate your monitor so that when your file say THIS teal and THAT orange the monitor produces it. But the monitor doesn’t make a reflective color, it produces emissive light. So you have to calibrate TO some values… you have to specify a white point (eg: color temperature) and a brightness. But if you view the monitor in a room under a different white point and different brightness of lights, your print won’t match.

If you hold a white piece of paper in room with tungsten yellow lights, your eyes adapt to the yellow lights and you recognize the paper is actually white. But a monitor might be calibrated to make a MUCH brighter and MUCH more blue white. If the white on your monitor is very bright and very blue compared to the light in your room, there is no way a print will match the monitor.

If you really go down the rabbit hole of printing, people who are super serious will have a print viewing booth next to their monitor with calibrated lights that the monitor is calibrated to. Short of that people will black out all the windows and fill the room with D50 or D65 light and then calibrate to that.

ICC printer profiles will help make your prints be more consistent between papers and if someone else printed somewhere else using ICCs they’d match better. And you can calibrate your monitor, but you need to view the print under the same lighting that you calibrated the monitor to in order for a print to match the monitor… and that takes a bit more work.