Color Assistant, retired from the app

This screen is no longer reachable in the app since May 27, 2026: its card was hidden and its entry button disabled. If you're looking for the button that used to carry this name, it's gone from the app's normal flow. What follows describes what COLORLAB did, and what to use instead today.

#What the Color Assistant did

Calibrating a color printer without a densitometer meant decoding a photo and comparing hues by eye. COLORLAB automated that decode: it took a photo of your fresh target placed next to a reference target, analyzed the light, guided you to point 14 color patches (7 on your print, 7 on the reference), then calculated CMYK deviations and offered a verdict with actions. You didn't measure by eye — the app did, within a frame you controlled at each step.

The chain ran 14 screens designed like a guided questionnaire: welcome and demo mode, generating and drying a CMY Venn target (one layer per day — Yellow, Magenta, Cyan —, 24 hours of drying between each), importing a photo showing both targets side by side, a Light Check comparing brightness between the two sides (ΔE < 25 ok, 25–50 warning), pointing the paper white on each target, then a quiz where you pointed 14 patches (7 on your print, 7 on the reference) that the app validated heuristically. The final computation combined white-balance gains, ΔE2000 Lab deviation and per-channel deltas to produce a score from 0 to 100 and an action: keep the profile (excellent), check your light conditions (warn), or generate .acv correction curves for Photoshop (critical, a Pro Mode feature).

#What to use instead today

Nothing today does exactly what the Color Assistant did: automatic photo-based printer-drift measurement disappeared with it. For color, here's what's left in the app and on the site:

• The Separation screen, in the app (Separation button in the main menu). It simulates print rendering layer by layer — Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black, plus Orange, Green, Violet in Full Gamut — from an image you import. It's a visual decision tool before you print, documented on the Color Separation Overlay page.
• The Color Venn target, generated free on the site — see the page. Three overlapping Cyan, Magenta, Yellow circles: you print it, expose it on your paper, and compare the seven zones by eye. There's no automatic scan-based measurement.
• Your per-channel curves, in the Curve workshop. They handle contrast and density for each channel separately — that's not a tint correction, but it's what's left for the part your black-and-white curve already covered.

#Worth remembering