European Color Initiative

The European Color Initiative (ECI) is an expert group that is concerned with media-neutral reproduction of color data in digital publication systems. It was formed in June 1996 by German publishers Bauer, Burda, Gruner + Jahr and Springer in Hamburg.

ECI offers several ICC profiles to be downloaded for free from their website to improve color management across publishing houses. This includes their very own ECI-RGB as recommended working color space on screen and ECI-CMYK (Fogra 53) for printing processes. They also offer test charts for device characterization.

RGB
The ECI-RGB color space, sometimes written ECI RGB or eciRGB, is a standardized RGB color space using the D50 white point (CIE xy: 0.34567, 0.35850) and NTSC color primaries: red 0.67, 0.33; green 0.21, 0.71; blue 0.14, 0.08. Its wide gamut covers most mass printing technologies and all current display technologies. Version 1 was released in 1999 and a mostly compatible, updated version 2 was published in April 2007, which was later republished as international standard ISO 22028-4:2012.

CMYK
The ECI-CMYK color space, sometimes written ECI CMYK or eciCMYK, is a standardized CMYK color space for graphic data exchange in the print industry. It is equivalent to Fogra 53, often spelt FOGRA53, and is intended to overcome limitations of and thereby replace the ISO Coated CMYK exchange color space (version 2 = Fogra 39, version 3 = Fogra 51).