ColorCast. How it works?

Hi

This is Jose Cortes from Spain.

I’m working in ceramics. We have introduced a new inkjet printer in the factory. This printer have five-color inks (CMYK+Pink) and three additional printing bars without colors. Our Magenta ink is a brown ink because it’s better to our ceramic products.

We have calibrated and profilled the printer with the i1PROFILER software with an i1PRO spectrophotometer.

We were used to work with four-color profiles (CMYK or C_YKPi) without the possibility to work with five-color profiles in others printers that we have. In Photoshop, we work with a proof preview of the output profile. But for five-color profile, we don’t have this possibility.

I met your program ColorThink in a color management course. But now, I’m interested in your ColorCast technology.

Please, could you explain me how ColorCast works with a little more detail?

Is there a possibility to test a ColorCast profile by myself?

Thanks a lot for your response.

I want to thank for all the information and the knowledge that I have read in ColorForums. I was able to apply this knowledge to my job and improve the color management of our production printers.

THANK YOU!!!

Best regards

Jose Cortes

Hello Jose, welcome! Were glad the forums have been helpful to you.

ColorCast is able to take the behavior of one profile and place it into the structure of another profile. This is particularly useful for people who cant use a certain kind of profile but can use others. For example, a typical office environment will have people printing through RGB drivers, and they would not be able to proof to a popular CMYK standard profile like GRACoL. ColorCast allows you to place the GRACoL profile into the shell of, say, an AdobeRGB profile, and allow the user to use this new profile to print GRACoL.

The same thing can be used in your situation. While Photoshop can do conversions using multi-channel profiles, the soft-proofing of that image in PS is not accurate. ColorCast will allow you to put the function of your 5-channel profile into the structure of another profile (such as an RGB or CMYK profile), and then you will be able to accurately soft- or hard-proof using that profile.

Not only can it be used by the print manufacturers themselves, but you can make a ColorCast profile available to your customers, so they can see what your 5-channel printing will look like, even on a simple office printer.

Theres more information on this in the colorwiki manual.
ColorCast works by creating a profile out of the Lab > device space workflow.

It is possible to see how the creation process works by downloading ColorThink Pro and running it in demo mode. There you can walk through the steps of creating a ColorCast profile using the Guide. In order to actually create a CC profile, you would have to buy the full version.
chromix.com/colorthink/download