Photoshop Terms A to Z - Glossary of the Letter "C"

2008-09-25

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Cache: An area of the hard drive where information is stored about the thumbnails, metadata, and ranking information in your images.

CAD cutter: CAD cutters use thermal film to produce full color prints at 600 dpi or higher. Resin ink cartridges are used, which can be similar to the ribbon cartridges you might have used with Alps and similar printers. The printer/cutter automatically prints and cuts out the design, you peel it off, and apply it to the substrate using a heat transfer machine. You’ll have to read your cutter’s documentation to purchase the correct inks and films.

Calibration: Brings a device like a monitor, scanner, or printer to an absolute standard that ensures consistency across devices. Calibrating is especially necessary when files are being passed from one person to another; what a client sees on their computer, compared to what you see on your computer, compared to what the service bureau sees on their computer can differ outrageously.

Calibration bars: When printing, check this option to print an 11-step grayscale step wedge moving from 0 percent black to 100 percent black in 10 percent increments.

Center crop marks: Prints marks where the image should be trimmed. These marks can also be useful if you are printing out an image for a demonstration using a slide projector, for package design work, or for any other type of work that requires CMYK printouts be aligned exactly.

Channels: Channels are located in the Channels palette and created automatically when a color mode is chosen and determined based on the colors in the image. In RGB mode, for instance, there are three channels: red, green, and blue.

Clear: This command enables you to delete a selection without placing that selection on the clipboard. It’s similar to the Cut command. Make sure if there are multiple layers in an image that you’ve selected the layer you want to work with from the layers palette.

Clone Stamp tool: Lets you duplicate any area in an image and “paint” that area over any other part of the image.

Clip art: Non-photographic graphic images that can be either vector or bitmap in form. Images in clip art collections are generally categorized by type, such as animals, vehicles, monuments, people, borders, edges, etc. These images can be edited, colored, and resized as required by the user.

CMYK mode: A color mode that uses cyan, magenta, yellow, and black to create its colors. CMYK mode assigns colors to pixels in percentages that are determined by the inks used (and have configured in the Color Settings). Color values range from 0 to 100 percent. For instance, a teal color might have 51 percent cyan, 4 percent magenta, 19 percent yellow, and 0 percent black. You can see these numbers in the Info palette. All zeroes produces a pure white.

Color gamut: The range of colors that a specific color mode can print in. The RGB color gamut can produce over 16 million colors, while the CMYK color gamut produces substantially less. A gamut is also the range of colors that a system can print or display.

For more “C” terms, see the next article in this series.

This post is part of the series: Photoshop Terms from A to Z - A Glossary

Learn common and obscure terms used by Adobe Photoshop in this A-to-Z series.