A correction mask is a way of isolating area of a digital image in order to change it without affecting the rest of the image, usually with the intention of changing the colour of the area.

In the Europe, America and Australasia, lots of people buy clothes from mail order Catalogues, it is a huge multi billion dollar business. This means that customers don’t see the physical clothes before they buy them so the colours that they see in the catalogues MUST be the same colour as the clothes that they get for both legal and practical reasons.  As a customer, you certainly wouldn’t want to order a jumper that looked orange in the catalogue but turned out to be red when it arrived on your doorstep.

Lets take fashion as an example.  In order to make sure that the real life red jumper looks the same shade of red as the photo in the catalogue, it is matched to a real sample of the jumper material in an environment where the lighting is carefully controlled to international standards (viewing booth).  This is called Swatch Matching.

In order to change the colour of our jumper we need to isolate it from the rest of the image and the way to do this is with a colour correction mask created in the industry standard imaging software Adobe Photoshop. Correction masks are highly labour intensive and therefore expensive and contribute to production studio bottlenecks in the fast turnaround, ever changing world of fashion.  Outsourcing the creation of masks to our studios saves you significant studio time and allows your pre-press operators to concentrate their skills on applying the colour correction, tweaking the images and the myriad of other jobs that crop up as print deadlines approach. It is easy to integrate our correction mask services into your pre-press workflow.  We provide a completely electronic workflow, moving image data via FTP (File Transfer Protocol), with online job creation and account management.  You can send us low resolution images, which wont strangle your bandwidth and use our special tools to automatically get the colour correction masks onto your original high resolution images. As with all our pre-press services we can offer a customised, flexible service with consistent quality, 24/7 support and a fantastic price point. Do you want to streamline your departmental budget, reduce deadline risk and ease the pressures on your pre-press department? Give us a call or e-mail us right now, we are happy to demonstrate our services on your images and talk to you about your individual imaging need.