Install little-cms2 with Homebrew

Project links

• Homepage
• Repository
• Upstream docs
• Package manager page

Commands and aliases

• jpgicc
• linkicc
• psicc
• tificc
• transicc

Project history

Little CMS was created by Marti Maria and first released in 1998. The project set out to be a small-footprint, accurate C color management module using International Color Consortium profiles, at a time when color management was often proprietary or bundled into large graphics systems.

The project's GitHub README describes Little CMS as a full implementation of ICC specification 4.4 with support for V2 and V4 profiles, including abstract, devicelink, and named-color profiles. The modern repository was created on GitHub on February 8, 2010 and contains the Little CMS 2 codebase, documentation, utilities, tests, and build systems.

Adoption history

The Little CMS maintainers describe the library as widely deployed in production projects across printer firmware, monitors, digital cameras, RIPs, publishing, scientific applications, and many Linux distributions. The project website gives a coarse estimate of 50 million to 200 million installations worldwide for the CMM color engine.

Its adoption is partly invisible: users encounter Little CMS through applications and operating-system packages rather than invoking it directly, while developers pull it in for standards-based ICC transforms without building a color engine themselves.

How it is used

The Homebrew package installs command-line tools such as jpgicc, tificc, psicc, transicc, and linkicc, alongside the library used by applications. Those tools expose profile conversion, inspection, and linking workflows useful to graphics and print pipelines.

The library is used when software needs deterministic conversion between device profiles, RGB/CMYK/Lab spaces, proofing transforms, or ICC V2/V4 compatibility without depending on a platform-specific color stack.

Why package nerds care

little-cms2 is a classic package-manager dependency: small, old, security-relevant, C-based, and transitively important to many media applications. It is the kind of formula users rarely install by name but often have in their dependency graph.

The package is also notable because it tracks a real-world standards domain. Its usefulness depends on ICC conformance, file-format edge cases, and security hardening around untrusted profiles, not on a flashy user interface.

Timeline

• 1998: Initial Little CMS release.
• 2005: ICC specification ISO 15076-1 was approved as an International Standard, a standards context cited by the project README.
• 2010-02-08: The mm2/Little-CMS GitHub repository was created.
• 2026-04-17: The Little CMS site announced Little CMS 2.19.
• 2026-05-06: The GitHub repository listed Little CMS 2.19.1 as a release.

Related projects

• Related color-management projects and domains include ICC profiles, lcms command-line utilities, Linux desktop color management, Argyll CMS, image editors, print RIP software, and applications that embed Little CMS for profile transforms.

Sources

• https://api.github.com/repos/mm2/Little-CMS
• https://github.com/mm2/Little-CMS
• https://www.littlecms.com/