Table of Contents
Color Factory processing sequence
This topic explains the sequence in which Color Factory processes files.
21. September 2026
Table of Contents
The sequence below is valid only for bitmap images (JPEG, BMP, and TIFF). Other formats, such as PDF, vector, and movies, use a different sequence.
Processing sequence
- Open file
- Unique ID processing
- IPTC Processing conversion and stripping
- Curves before Color Management for CMYK file only
- Color Management for CMYK files only
- Apply soft crop, etc.
- Flip mirror
- Resize
- Pixel edit
- Contrast (Includes SmartColor and SmartClean)
- Filter Unsharp Mask, etc.
- Curves before Color Management for RGB and Grayscale images
- Color Management for RGB and Grayscale images
- Curves after Color Management
- Hue Saturation and Luminance filter
- Auto routing and file name generation
- IPTC Processing templates and export
- Unique ID generation
- Remote layout low-res generation
- Auto printing
- Generating image file
- Generating FS thumbnail and preview
- Copy file to final destination
Note
The processing sequence shown above describes Color Factory's internal processing engine and does not directly correspond to the names of all processing actions available when configuring a channel.
For example, testing has shown that metadata values copied from filenames and folder names are available to Metadata Macros, indicating these values are populated before the Metadata Macro is executed.
Overriding the default processing sequence
It is not possible to override the processing sequence within a single channel. If you need to create a workflow that performs operations in a particular sequence, you can create channels that perform single tasks and chain these together in your order of choice. This can be accomplished by outputting the files from the first channel to the input folder of the next channel, and so on (daisy-chaining).