Gamut mapping.

Gamut mapping is the decision applied to every color in a file that the press, ink and substrate cannot produce, and the ICC handle for choosing that decision is the rendering intent. The ICC's own workflow guidance sorts them by purpose: the perceptual and saturation intents are meant for re-purposing content to a new medium, the colorimetric intents for proofing, with ICC-absolute colorimetric reserved for cases where the proof has to carry the look of the original medium. The ICC specification ICC.1:2022 does not fix the mapping itself. The colorimetric intents "preserve the colorimetry of in-gamut colours at the expense of out-of-gamut colours", and "the mapping of out-of-gamut colours is not specified but should be consistent with the intended use of the transform" (clause 6.1). For perceptual and saturation, "the exact colour rendering" is "vendor specific" (6.2.4, 6.2.5). Media-relative colorimetric also re-scales so the media white maps to the PCS white, which "introduces some change in all colours" when the two media whites differ (0.4). So what happens to an unreachable colour depends on the profile and the RIP that built it, not on the standard, and that is where a shop gets hurt: a navy gradient, a deep red logo or a shadow with detail in it can arrive flatter than the file, and the spec gives no rule to predict by how much. Nobody catches it on screen, because the screen has the gamut and the garment does not, and the honest fix is in the artwork rather than in the RIP.