Design Nomenclature / Color
Color cast
Also called cast, colour cast, colour shift
This entry has not been translated yet and is shown in English.
An unwanted hue laid uniformly across an image, usually from an illuminant the capture never corrected for or a profile mismatch on output. The tell is in the neutrals: a cast is nearly invisible in saturated areas and obvious in anything that should be grey, which is why correction starts by finding something known to be neutral.
Not to be confused with
- White pointThe chromaticity a space agrees to call neutral: D65 for sRGB and Display P3, D50 for print and ICC's profile connection space. It is a choice rather than a measurement of anything absolute, and mismatching it is how images pick up a cast on the way from screen to press.
- MetamerismTwo samples with different spectral curves matching under one illuminant and separating under another. The match was never in the samples — it was in the three cone responses they happened to coincide on. Hence the fabric matched under shop light that splits apart in the street, and the conditional nature of every ink-to-screen approximation.