Colour is what camera measured and recorded (less metameric error). The goal is to preserve colour it measured and present it in a colorimetric space. One of the methods is to find and apply an optimized transform between device data space, which isn't colorimetric, and XYZ or Lab colour space. There are few methods of dealing with metameric error, too. It's one of those calibration class tasks. Next, we move to perceptual matching, and those operations do change colour.