Photographic - Typically results in less-saturated output than presentation rendering when printing out-of-gamut colors. This style preserves tonal relationships in images, and scales the grayscale tonal range in the source to the available tonal range in the output device.

Photographs, including scans and images from stock photography and digital camera images.

Image, Contrast, and Perceptual

Presentation - Creates saturated colors but does not match printed colors precisely to displayed colors. In-gamut colors, such as flesh tones, are rendered well. This style is similar to Photographic rendering intent, and can be used to increase contrast for grayscale content.

Artwork and graphs in presentations. This style can be used for mixed pages that contain presentation graphics and photographs.

Saturation, Graphics

Relative Colorimetric - Provides white point transformation between the source and destination white points. For example, the bluish-white color (gray) of a monitor is replaced by paper white. This style avoids visible borders between blank spaces and white objects. Relative Colorimetric is the default rendering intent for grayscale and is best suited for preserving the appearance of gray.

Advanced use when color matching is important, but you prefer white colors in the document to print as paper white. This style may also be used with PostScript color management to affect CMYK data for simulation purposes.

Relative Colorimetric

Absolute Colorimetric - Provides no white point transformation between the source and destination white points. For example, the bluish-white color (gray) is not replaced by paper white. This style can introduce gamut clipping in high light and shadow details.

Situations when exact colors are needed and visible borders are not distracting. This style may also be used with PostScript color management to affect CMYK data for simulation purposes.

Setting CMYK rendering intent to Absolute Colorimetric simulates the white of the paper using CMYK values rather than leaving the paper white areas of the page unprinted.

Absolute Colorimetric

Pure Primaries - Uses pure colorants, free from contaminating colorants that are introduced when color management tries to match the appearance of a color on image systems with different color capabilities.