Occasionally during the QC process, your team may notice some data has been flagged by Creative Force’s Auto QA function. The following article will cover where that data is pulled from and how to correct it if the system has let you know there are errors.

Auto QA is enabled when a preset has been created in Gamma and assigned to a position on the Style Guide. In Hue, the Auto QA function will give you a green tick if the requirements are satisfied, and an orange mark if the following requirements are not satisfied:

Depending on the workflow for post-production setup, if ‘Override Auto QA’ is enabled, you can upload the images normally. If not, Auto QA won’t let you upload the images unless you change the unmatched requirements. If Auto QA is overridden in Hue and the image is uploaded without the specifications met, the warnings will also appear in the QC step to inform the user that the image does not meet all the requirements.

For more information on Auto QA please refer to the following two articles:

We can see in the example above that the system is alerting the user performing the QC task that the image was uploaded despite not meeting the Preset Specifications for the DPI, Dimensions and Color Profile fields.

Where does Creative Force pull this information?

Creative Force pulls the majority of this data from the File Header. These are the first bytes of information that are often stored at the start of the file. The file header contains information about the image such as image size, resolution, the camera that was used to create the image and when the image was created, etc.

In Creative Force, if the file header does not contain enough information regarding the File Format or the Color Profile, the system will fall back on information contained within the metadata.

Next, let’s take a closer look at our example above to see how we can extract this information from an image file and correct it if the image is not meeting the preset specifications.

Correcting Color Profile

One issue your team may encounter is the warning icon in QC indicating that the Color Profile of an image does not match the specifications set on the preset. In our example above, the preset assigned to the position on the Style Guide requires that the image’s color profile be sRGB IEC61966-2.1.

However, when in QC we can see that the system is alerting the user performing the QC task that the color profile of the image uploaded is not RGB IEC61966-2.1.

It is important to note that in the QC steps in Gamma as well as the HUE panel in Photoshop, the value next to the warning symbol is showing you what color profile the preset requires, it is not showing you what the color profile of the image is.

There are two ways we recommend checking the color profile of an image. We’ll cover both below:

Option One: Photoshop

Let’s say the Art Director rejects the image back to Internal Post in order for the retoucher to correct the color profile. In order to see what the color of the image is, you’ll need to navigate to the bottom left corner of the Photoshop canvas and select the small arrow icon. From there, you’ll see a list of options. Select “Document Profile” from the list. We can now see that the Color Profile of our example image is actually Adobe RGB (1998), and is a mismatch to the required color profile shown on the HUE panel.

Exiftool

The second way to confirm the Color Profile is by using a metadata extraction tool such as ExifTool. The benefit to this method is that it also allows you to quickly check the other values seen on the preset requirement, such as File Format, DPI, and File Extension to ensure that all are meeting the requirements.

Once downloaded, open a new terminal window, type in “exiftool” and a space, then drag and crop your image and press Enter. You can then use cmd + F to find the ICC Profile Name.