How to convert from CMYK to RGB in Java correctly?

There is a lot of good stuff in the existing answers already. But none of them is a complete solution that handles the different kinds of CMYK JPEG images.

For CMYK JPEG images, you need to distinguish between regular CMYK, Adobe CMYK (with inverted values, i.e. 255 for no ink and 0 for maximum ink) and Adobe CYYK (some variant with inverted colors as well).

This solution here requires Sanselan (or Apache Commons Imaging as it's called now) and it requires a reasonable CMYK color profile (.icc file). You can get the later one from Adobe or from eci.org.

public class JpegReader {

    public static final int COLOR_TYPE_RGB = 1;
    public static final int COLOR_TYPE_CMYK = 2;
    public static final int COLOR_TYPE_YCCK = 3;

    private int colorType = COLOR_TYPE_RGB;
    private boolean hasAdobeMarker = false;

    public BufferedImage readImage(File file) throws IOException, ImageReadException {
        colorType = COLOR_TYPE_RGB;
        hasAdobeMarker = false;

        ImageInputStream stream = ImageIO.createImageInputStream(file);
        Iterator<ImageReader> iter = ImageIO.getImageReaders(stream);
        while (iter.hasNext()) {
            ImageReader reader = iter.next();
            reader.setInput(stream);

            BufferedImage image;
            ICC_Profile profile = null;
            try {
                image = reader.read(0);
            } catch (IIOException e) {
                colorType = COLOR_TYPE_CMYK;
                checkAdobeMarker(file);
                profile = Sanselan.getICCProfile(file);
                WritableRaster raster = (WritableRaster) reader.readRaster(0, null);
                if (colorType == COLOR_TYPE_YCCK)
                    convertYcckToCmyk(raster);
                if (hasAdobeMarker)
                    convertInvertedColors(raster);
                image = convertCmykToRgb(raster, profile);
            }

            return image;
        }

        return null;
    }

    public void checkAdobeMarker(File file) throws IOException, ImageReadException {
        JpegImageParser parser = new JpegImageParser();
        ByteSource byteSource = new ByteSourceFile(file);
        @SuppressWarnings("rawtypes")
        ArrayList segments = parser.readSegments(byteSource, new int[] { 0xffee }, true);
        if (segments != null && segments.size() >= 1) {
            UnknownSegment app14Segment = (UnknownSegment) segments.get(0);
            byte[] data = app14Segment.bytes;
            if (data.length >= 12 && data[0] == 'A' && data[1] == 'd' && data[2] == 'o' && data[3] == 'b' && data[4] == 'e')
            {
                hasAdobeMarker = true;
                int transform = app14Segment.bytes[11] & 0xff;
                if (transform == 2)
                    colorType = COLOR_TYPE_YCCK;
            }
        }
    }

    public static void convertYcckToCmyk(WritableRaster raster) {
        int height = raster.getHeight();
        int width = raster.getWidth();
        int stride = width * 4;
        int[] pixelRow = new int[stride];
        for (int h = 0; h < height; h++) {
            raster.getPixels(0, h, width, 1, pixelRow);

            for (int x = 0; x < stride; x += 4) {
                int y = pixelRow[x];
                int cb = pixelRow[x + 1];
                int cr = pixelRow[x + 2];

                int c = (int) (y + 1.402 * cr - 178.956);
                int m = (int) (y - 0.34414 * cb - 0.71414 * cr + 135.95984);
                y = (int) (y + 1.772 * cb - 226.316);

                if (c < 0) c = 0; else if (c > 255) c = 255;
                if (m < 0) m = 0; else if (m > 255) m = 255;
                if (y < 0) y = 0; else if (y > 255) y = 255;

                pixelRow[x] = 255 - c;
                pixelRow[x + 1] = 255 - m;
                pixelRow[x + 2] = 255 - y;
            }

            raster.setPixels(0, h, width, 1, pixelRow);
        }
    }

    public static void convertInvertedColors(WritableRaster raster) {
        int height = raster.getHeight();
        int width = raster.getWidth();
        int stride = width * 4;
        int[] pixelRow = new int[stride];
        for (int h = 0; h < height; h++) {
            raster.getPixels(0, h, width, 1, pixelRow);
            for (int x = 0; x < stride; x++)
                pixelRow[x] = 255 - pixelRow[x];
            raster.setPixels(0, h, width, 1, pixelRow);
        }
    }

    public static BufferedImage convertCmykToRgb(Raster cmykRaster, ICC_Profile cmykProfile) throws IOException {
        if (cmykProfile == null)
            cmykProfile = ICC_Profile.getInstance(JpegReader.class.getResourceAsStream("/ISOcoated_v2_300_eci.icc"));

        if (cmykProfile.getProfileClass() != ICC_Profile.CLASS_DISPLAY) {
            byte[] profileData = cmykProfile.getData();

            if (profileData[ICC_Profile.icHdrRenderingIntent] == ICC_Profile.icPerceptual) {
                intToBigEndian(ICC_Profile.icSigDisplayClass, profileData, ICC_Profile.icHdrDeviceClass); // Header is first

                cmykProfile = ICC_Profile.getInstance(profileData);
            }
        }

        ICC_ColorSpace cmykCS = new ICC_ColorSpace(cmykProfile);
        BufferedImage rgbImage = new BufferedImage(cmykRaster.getWidth(), cmykRaster.getHeight(), BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_RGB);
        WritableRaster rgbRaster = rgbImage.getRaster();
        ColorSpace rgbCS = rgbImage.getColorModel().getColorSpace();
        ColorConvertOp cmykToRgb = new ColorConvertOp(cmykCS, rgbCS, null);
        cmykToRgb.filter(cmykRaster, rgbRaster);
        return rgbImage;
    }
}


static void intToBigEndian(int value, byte[] array, int index) {
    array[index]   = (byte) (value >> 24);
    array[index+1] = (byte) (value >> 16);
    array[index+2] = (byte) (value >>  8);
    array[index+3] = (byte) (value);
}

The code first tries to read the file using the regular method, which works for RGB files. If it fails, it reads the details of the color model (profile, Adobe marker, Adobe variant). Then it reads the raw pixel data (raster) and does all the necessary conversion (YCCK to CMYK, inverted colors, CMYK to RGB).

Update:

The original code has a slight problem: the result was too bright. The people from the twelvemonkeys-imageio project had the same problem (see this post) and have fixed it by patching the color profile such that Java uses a perceptual color render intent. The fix has been integrated into the above code.

I will copy my answer from the other thread:

In order to be displayed correctly CMYK images should contain color space information as ICC Profile. So the best way is to use that ICC Profile which can be easily extracted with Sanselan:

ICC_Profile iccProfile = Sanselan.getICCProfile(new File("filename.jpg"));
ColorSpace cs = new ICC_ColorSpace(iccProfile);    

In case there is no ICC Profile attached to the image, I would use Adobe profiles as default.

Now the problem is that you cannot just load JPEG file with custom color space using ImageIO as it will fail throwing an exception complaining that it does not support some color space or sthing like that. Hense you will have to work with rasters:

JPEGImageDecoder decoder = JPEGCodec.createJPEGDecoder(new ByteArrayInputStream(data));
Raster srcRaster = decoder.decodeAsRaster();

BufferedImage result = new BufferedImage(srcRaster.getWidth(), srcRaster.getHeight(), BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_RGB);
WritableRaster resultRaster = result.getRaster();

ColorConvertOp cmykToRgb = new ColorConvertOp(cs, result.getColorModel().getColorSpace(), null);
cmykToRgb.filter(srcRaster, resultRaster);

You can then use result wherever you need and it will have converted colors.

In practice, however I've come across some images (taken with camera and processed with Photoshop) that had somehow inverted color values so the resulting image was always inverted and even after inverting them once again they were too bright. Although I still have no idea how to find out when exactly to use it (when I need to invert pixel values), I have an algorithm that corrects these values and convert color pixel by pixel:

JPEGImageDecoder decoder = JPEGCodec.createJPEGDecoder(new ByteArrayInputStream(data));
Raster srcRaster =  decoder.decodeAsRaster();

BufferedImage ret = new BufferedImage(srcRaster.getWidth(), srcRaster.getHeight(), BufferedImage.TYPE_INT_RGB);
WritableRaster resultRaster = ret.getRaster();

for (int x = srcRaster.getMinX(); x < srcRaster.getWidth(); ++x)
    for (int y = srcRaster.getMinY(); y < srcRaster.getHeight(); ++y) {

        float[] p = srcRaster.getPixel(x, y, (float[])null);

        for (int i = 0; i < p.length; ++i)
            p[i] = 1 - p[i] / 255f;

        p = cs.toRGB(p);

        for (int i = 0; i < p.length; ++i)
            p[i] = p[i] * 255f;

        resultRaster.setPixel(x, y, p);
    }

I'm pretty sure RasterOp or ColorConvertOp could be used to make conversation more efficient, but this was enough for me.

Seriously, there is no need to use these simplified CMYK to RGB conversion algorithms as you can use ICC Profile that is embedded into image or available for free from Adobe. Resulting image is going to look better if not perfect (with embedded profile).

There is a new open source library which supports CMYK processing. All you need to do is to add the dependency to your project and a new reader will be added to the list of readers (while the known JPEGImageReader can't deal with CMYK). You will probably want to iterate over these readers and read the image using the first reader which doesn't throw exception. This package is a release candidate, but i am using it and it solved a huge problem that we had hard time dealing with.

http://mvnrepository.com/artifact/com.twelvemonkeys.imageio/imageio-jpeg/

EDIT: as stated in the comments, you can now also find a stable release rather than RC.

You can do the iteration this way to get the BufferedImage, and after you got that, the rest is easy (you can use any existing image converting package to save it as another format):

try (ImageInputStream input = ImageIO.createImageInputStream(source)) {

        // Find potential readers
        Iterator<ImageReader> readers = ImageIO.getImageReaders(input);

        // For each reader: try to read
        while (readers != null && readers.hasNext()) {
            ImageReader reader = readers.next();
            try {
                reader.setInput(input);
                BufferedImage image = reader.read(0);
                return image;
            } catch (IIOException e) {
                // Try next reader, ignore.
            } catch (Exception e) {
                // Unexpected exception. do not continue
                throw e;
            } finally {
                // Close reader resources
                reader.dispose();
            }
        }

        // Couldn't resize with any of the readers
        throw new IIOException("Unable to resize image");
    }