What is meant by rendering intent?

A well colour-managed digital system should be able to match all of the colours that are within the gamuts of both printer and monitor.

A good system will also be able to adjust ('render') any out-of-gamut colours in ways that ensure that any image produced by the monitor, and the same image reflected from a print, both convey the same ‘realistic’ sense of the real-life scene that you photographed. They should look ‘the same’ in the sense that the features of the photo we think important, such as shadow detail, colour balance, and tonal range, create the same impression on a screen as in print.

This is what colour-management is about.

Rendering Intent

When you send an image to a printer, how any out-of-gamut colours are dealt with, depends on the rendering intent that you choose.

Most photo printing applications allow you to choose at least two rendering intents: relative colorimetric, and perceptual. There are two other possible rendering intents: saturation, and absolute colorimetric but they are seldom used in photography.

The perceptual rendering intent compresses all colours so that the most saturated out-of-gamut colours in the image are rendered as the most saturated colours (of the same hue) the printer can produce. All other colours are scaled back proportionately. Some printed colours will, deliberately, not be the same as those in the image, but the overall tonality and colour relationships in the image are maintained.

Relative colorimetric rendering intent essentially assigns all out-of-gamut colours to the nearest in-gamut colour of the same hue, and leaves all other colours unchanged. This intent preserves colour accuracy but can destroy colour balance if an image contains a lot of out-of-gamut colours.

If your printing software has a 'soft proofing' capability (where the printer gamut is simulated on your monitor) you can choose the rendering intent that best suits the colour distribution in your photograph.

There's a good discussion of rendering intents, and soft proofing, on site.

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