![]() I have a spread of profiles I have created which are balanced in various ways between objectivity and subjectivity. I have tried QP card, basiccolor and lumariver profile designer and found lumariver to be the best option in terms of both reprographic and general use profiles. ![]() This is also probably why x-rite have gone with a more lowest-common-denominator look. There are other profiling softwares, but it seems like a difficult area to make money in and the range reflects this. I also find it useful to shoot a card to cover my back: helping argue my corner with I'll informed clients, or troubleshoot difficult colours for example.Īll this said, I do have custom profiles that I use- just not ones made with the x-rite tool. For downstream processes, it provides a known set of values that retouchers and printers for example can use to make decisions. The grey card patch, I use frequently and is the most neutral one I have used.Įven if you are not making a custom profile there are still advantages to using the large target. However as much I would argue against the software, I use the card itself. With these caveats in mind, I have found using no custom profile better than using the x-rite profile. The standard capture one profile varies between cameras whereas Adobe seem to be aiming for consistency. I found Adobe to have the more accurate and neutral colour, while capture one looks the most pleasing out of the gate. The out of the box profiles have always been better in my opinion. In particular the reds are overcooked and I found that even neutral tones ended up being contaminated with red. By which I mean not accurate and also, to my eye, ugly. I don't know which genres they had in mind when designing the profile, but I have been working a lot in both Fine Art reproduction and product in the last 5 years and for these applications, the x-rite look is not useable. The software produces one flavour of profile only and, while it prevents anything crazy happening by locking what it's doing away from the user inside its back box, it does not produce accurate colour- rather a subjective profile. Here's my TL DR- the software is junk, but the target itself is a useful tool in certain situations.įirst, I think it's valuable to think about the physical colorchecker and the x-rite profiling software separately. Whenever I see a post about the colorchecker I'm surprised by how wooly the discussion is. I suppose you have to each ask yourself how much your time is worth and then see if the hours you'll save isn't worth the pricetag. I'd recommend updating your CC Passport every 2 - 3 years. You can now create and save custom ICC camera profiles for virtually any lighting situation utilizing either an X-Rite ColorChecker Passport Photo 2, ColorChecker Classic or ColorChecker Digital SG target in conjunction with the X-Rite Camera Calibration software v2.0īack to why else you would want a new version: Like any precision tool, it can degrade with wear and how it is stored. Even more important is the updated camera calibration software v2.0. The 18% gray card is a must-have for quickly setting camera exposure and removing color casts. It gets you to a neutral place quickly but also lets you profile specific camera/lens combinations and based on specific lighting conditions. The ColorChecker Passport is a precision device designed to help you manage your color starting at capture. The back half of this review infuriates me. Please check out the video linked above and let me know what your thoughts are on the Passport. A ColorChecker Passport is a great tool to help towards that aim. I think it's important that we focus on that aspect as much as we focus on things like composition and lighting. Ultimately, colors or the use of colors are a fundamental of photography and art for that matter. For this reason, I highly recommend using a ColorChecker Passport because I firmly believe better and more accurate colors will inherently improve your photography. Colors like yellow, for example, don't actually exist on your sensor and are produced based on some very capable algorithms. For the most part, your camera does a fantastic job at producing color however, it's not perfect and things can go wrong at times. Essentially the colors that most camera sensors produce are based on a combination of three color pixels, red, blue, and green. In light of this, I decided to produce a video that demonstrates how to use the passport and also why I think it's important for every professional photographer to have and use one.Ĭamera sensors have their respective limitations when it comes to color because most of the colors that are produced are interpolated. Recently, X-rite updated their popular color reference tool and released the new ColorChecker Passport 2.
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