A System of Tools

ColorThink is comprised of several separate tools which form a powerful system to help you Calibrate your printing system, Verify its accuracy and prepare your measurements for ICC Profiling or use as color references.

Gamut Comparison

(available with the Pro license level)

Also highly anticipated is the ability to analyze and compare two gamuts. ColorThink 4 uses gamut subtraction and/or addition to create an entirely new kind of graph. For example: When sRGB and a press profile are compared, ColorThink 4 subtracts the portion of the press profile that is left outside of sRGB. This is a very clear illustration of the colors on press that are unavailable if sRGB is your working space. The compare function can reverse the subtraction, so the press profile is subtracted from the sRGB gamut. You can also select the shared gamut to be shown in addition to the fully combined gamut. The Plot Item inspector shows the gamut volumes of each of the two original gamuts as well as the comparison volume. The gamut comparison index or GCI is also an easy number to relate to and is calculated in accordance to the ISO standard.

Color Assets

(available with all license levels)

This is a huge benefit for many color folks that have a zillion profiles and related files in various places. ColorThink 4 organizes all Color Assets, including profiles that are installed in your system plus other assets that are located wherever you store them.

Filter them by the kind of asset, the color space of the asset or even arbitrary text.

ColorThink harvests tons of meta-data about each asset type, including primary colors, asset type, color space, gamut volume and various size parameters and even the max density value Dmax. Then you can sort by these values to find the largest gamut profile or the paper with the lowest Dmax. There is so much power in the organizational benefits of the new Color Assets that you'll just have to see for yourself. This feature will save literally hours of search time.

LCH Mode

(available with all license levels)

Another effective coordinate space which unfolds profiles and other data sets is LCH. Color hue, which normally goes around the color wheel like hands of a clock is stretched out into a straight line. ColorThink 4 graphs in LCH allowing you to evaluate your color from a very different perspective. With this view the relative saturation or chroma of each of the colors is now easily compared because they're viewed across a straight line. Alternate color spaces like Jab and OKLab can also be used in this mode so you can see how they affect the saturation to become a lot more regular.

Targets

Scans targets created by:

• MeasureTool
• ColorPort
• i1Profiler
• Barbieri Chart Generator

And they can be scanned with virtually any instrument (the iSis is a stickler for needing multiple items specified, so it requires a target created for the iSis - but! iSis targets can be scanned by virtually all other instruments)

Also, target definitions are shared between all CHROMiX applications and services, so Curve4, Curve+, ColorThink 4 and Maxwell all share the same scanning targets and moving between apps is easy.

Corner Aiming (LFP)

The Barbieri Spectro LFP and LFPqb typically require users to aim the instrument at points 17.5 mm lower than the top edge of the target. Targets specifically made for scanning on the LFP have these markings, but many others do not.

In order to have the flexibility you need, we added the option to use the normal target corners for aiming. Now it's easy to scan any target on an LFP/qb without having a ruler and sharpie pen in hand.

Reverse-Order Row Scanning (i1 Pro)

When hand scanning targets row-by-row, our tools allow scanning from the bottom row up, ensuring the scanning instrument (and ruler in some cases) will not mark un-measured rows.

MeasureWatch Control and Verify

Implementing support for modern instruments within a company can be tricky.

Customers need to control the aperture, reflective / transmissive scan mode, M-series filtration and other features to ensure each measurement is gathered and recorded correctly. MeasureWatch Control benefits range from intelligent default behaviors - like ensuring that production measurements automatically configure the instrument to match reference colors - to powerful management control - such as locking out instruments that don't provide the required M-series measurements (in Maxwell Client)

MeasureWatch Control features are included with all of our measurement tools in Curve, Curve+, ColorThink 4 and Maxwell. We felt these control capabilities were too important to leave to chance so they're built into every measurement we make.

MeasureWatch Verify, Maxwell's instrument verification service launched in December 2011, enables instrument verification and trending by measuring a Color Reference Material target. CRMs including reference measurements can conform to ISO-9001 and reduce the need for expensive instrument re-certification.