Perfect Color in Your Photos - with the ColorChecker Passport Photo 2 from Calibrite!
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- Опубліковано 10 вер 2024
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Want better and more consistent colors in your digital photograph? Read on!
I'm Joe Brady and I have been using the Calibrite ColorChecker Passport Photo 2 (CCPP2) for a long time now, and it is a tool that goes with me everywhere. You may have remembered it from X-Rite, and this is the same bit of gear - but with a name change and the addition of both a gray and white balance target.
What the CCPP2 does is provide your editing software with a set of known colors and values that allow it to create a custom color calibration for your camera in different lighting conditions. It sounds complicated, but it is incredibly easy.
You would think that every camera manufacturer uses the same standards for red, green and blue - but they all interpret color differently. Add to that the fact that the raw processors in Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw have their own default color conversions (which are costing you a lot of color depth and accuracy) and each step of the way degrades your color.
When you create a custom calibration with the Passport, you then have the data necessary to quickly and easily get perfect color. This is easier to show then explain in text - and that’s what today’s video is about.
There are more details and situation to explain, but this first video shows you the basic of how to create a custom color profile for your camera in Lightroom and then use it to snap all of your colors into place.
Want to learn more? You can dig deeper and get your questions answered at www.calibrite.com
My 5 cents to this after 25 years in printing industry. Very true for RGB colour space. Can be applied for grey balance in all spaces, no doubts about it. But be cautious with the colours entering the CMYK territory for the very first time. P.S. This checker is absolutely necessary when shooting painted art and everything when colour accuracy is paramount.
I agree about your views on entering CMYK space, however, since this tool is designed for creating a camera profile, it is only applicable to RGB. I will be getting to RGB to CMYK conversions at the end of a Color Workflow Series I am currently working on!
I've had mine in my camera bag forever....I guess it's time to take it out and use it.
Haha same
HI Joe keep up the Great work.
Thank You -Joe ! Greatly appreciate your expert training.
Looking forward for next detailed video
Thanks, Joe.
hi joe, I am from nepal. Is there a way to use in video editing and color correcting as well?
Wondering how do you set your white and black point value. Datacolor Spyder Checkr suggests 230 for white point and 10 for black point in order to get accurate colours.
Hi Jo would you recommend using the passport for a sunrise or sunset image ? Or would it remove all the golden colour I am trying to capture in the image
Best to make a daylight custom camera profile, shoot your raw image of a sunrise or sunset, apply the color profile but NOT the white balance. You are quite right that if you white balance for sunrise or sunset you will color correct your beautiful "golden hour" shots to daylight. Happy photographing!
Thats cool. Ill try that. I found it in the old Adobe Photoshop:
Image >Mode >Assign Profile >Profile (drop down menu) >ColourMatch RGB
Unless the image you are playing with is a screen capture from online that has no profile, NEVER use assign Profile! The safest bet would be to use Convert to profile and assign sRGB. Much more to follow!
@@JoeBradyPhotography oh ok. Thank you for the advice, much appreciated.
Ive never actually used profiles and such. I colour corrected in photoshop afterwards.
I used to take a photo of someones white collar or dress to white balance, back in the 35m days. So my first frame was always a referance.
Ill revisit these colourchecker boards again.
In all my 48yrs of Photography (started when i was 6) its the one thing thats kept my interested, as theres always more to learn. Im getting into AI photo manipulation, and using it as a tool, rather than a reliance. Drones is hopefully next, so that i can climb into and around a 3d space! that will be so cool.
BUT nothing compares to capturing light, actually holding it in your hands, and watching an image rise up out of the dark. Truly magical process. Its just a shame it cost so flipping much now.
I find this works great for landscapes, but the Reds are way too strong for portraits in my opinion! The muted colors look better in Adobe Color when editing portraits in Lightroom with my Nikon Z8 and Z6.
The ColorChecker profile - when shot under your lighting conditions, will provide the most accurate color possible from your camera. After that, we all make adjustments to our liking, be it saturation reduction or addition!
What is the difference between the passport video 2 ? Which one is better for photos and printings ?
Both the ColorChecker Passport Photo 2 and the ColorChecker Passport Video 2 have the ColorChecker Classic target that is used by Camera Calibration software to create the custom camera profile for still photo editing. If you shoot video as well as still images, Calibrite has made it easy to purchase one Passport product, ColorChecker Passport Video 2, that includes two targets developed for video set up and editing, AND also includes a white balance target and the ColorChecker Classic target that is used to create custom camera profiles for still photography. Photo and Video in ONE Passport.
I have a colorchecker passport from XRITE 2009. (Sekonic version) Is there any sort of expiration date on the passport? Do the color patches change over time, or can I count on the accuracy forever?
If you have kept it closed, and haven't spilled anything on it, it is probably just fine. Download the latest software and plugins at calibrite.com and give it a try!
Are you using auto white balance when shooting the card? I keep my camera on "daylight" wb most of the time.
Your white balance setting doesn’t affect creating a profile as the software calculates WB by reading it off one of the neutral patches on the target. Understand that white balance for a raw file is not built in to the image and can be changed.
To expand on Joe's answer, you can use literally any in camera white balance EXCEPT auto. The white balance when shooting the reference photo for creating the profile and for shooting your images that you plan to correct to neutral must be set on an unmoving white balance. Auto causes the white balance setting to shift from shot to shot so there' no way to follow it. Good question!
So say if your at the place here in your video for a few days and you have a few different locations you wanna go to and at different times of the day and different days etc and the sun is obviously different for each. 1. Do you still have to take a pic of the ColorChecker each time the sun or something changes. 2. With the Caliration color thing you did, do you have to do that for each set of photos that is using the same pic you took with the color checker or no?
What primarily changes through the day - at least the part you notice - is the color temperature. What the calibration file does is provide a color corrected profile for how your camera produces colors. In reality, you could use one daylight profile for all of your images and they would have better color, but in situations when there is a color reflecting onto everything - like the red dirt of the desert southwest, or a field of green grass - a custom profile for that location will correct for the impact of the reflected color.
I also prefer to create profiles for cloudy conditions, and again for dry vs wet places because a lot of moisture in the air just down on the red component.
You would not want to use your midday profile ADN white balance at sunrise, because it would cancel out the golden light, but the profile itself combined with the morning white balance will produce great color.
I'm going to produce a few more videos that go into more detail - your questions need a deeper dive - thank you!
Wow, what terrible typing on my part! The easy answer is that for most images, you can use your daylight/midday profile for all of your pictures and just adjust the white balance accordingly. Again the exception would be when there is one color reflecting all over the place. I like to create profiles for very different places (say east coast vs desert southwest ) and for cloudy vs sunny, but I will typically use a profile from any similar location.
For example, when I do a trip to Moab, the profile applies to Monument Valley, and Arizona, and when I travel to Florida, I find that my New York profiles work just fine. To be safe, I shoot the ColorChecker everywhere I go as it gives my a white balance target and the ability to create a profile for the location to see if it might be better.
By the way, if you still have the camera, you can create profiles with it today and apply. it to images shot 20 years ago. Keep in mind that profiles are camera specific (even my model number) so you would need one for each camera you shoot with.
Perfect colour is very important for many pro photographers, for example those doing fashion work for catalogues and those shooting design work where there is a need to match paint colour together with some scientific or medical applications. For most photographers the exact matching of colour is irrelevant. We just alter the colour until it looks good! For most of us the colour checker is perhaps rather a waste of money.
As someone who primarily shoots landscapes, I respectively disagree with you! Try shooting in places like Monument Valley and then doing the color correction yourself. Can it be done? Of course if you have the skills, but having a profile snaps those difficult colors into place. Of course, the final color mix is subjective and part of adding our own impressions to a scene, but getting back the colors that are lost from the standard Adobe Conversion is so much easier with a profile.
Pro tip, you should click your white balance after employing the custom color profile, not before.
Curious why you say this - since my raw files are processed in Lightroom Classic, the order of applying filters doesn't matter - since actually nothing is actually happening to the file. What software are you using for your raw file processing?
@@JoeBradyPhotography I’m using LR Classic. If you want an accurate white balance, you need to click on a neutral target on the corrected, custom Color Checker profile. If you click on an uncorrected, target you will be adjusting white balance based on an uncorrected profile. If you don’t believe me, try it. You will get different white balance values from clicking an uncorrected target then switching to a corrected profile. Compared to clicking a patch on a corrected profile. Essentially the color of the neutral patch will change, when going from an Adobe RGB (uncalibrated) profile to a custom calibrated profile, therefore rendering different white balance results. Bottom line, select your custom profile made with your color checker target, then set your white balance. After that, you can sync your profile and WB settings to other photos taken in the same light. Hope this helps.
So this is a tool to create color accurate images in the worst possible light - the midday light
It does much more than that! It's not for midday light, it's just that shooting the target during midday eliminates the color bias of sunrise and sunset. Using a warm white balance for sunrise combined with the profile created at midday will give you great color results.
Why don't you check and compare corrected colorchecker rgb colors with those provided by the manufacturer? Basically no one dare to do it, beucase it would be a disappointment... better just talk about it... You just blindly accept that the new look is correct, but not. It would be even bigger disappointment to create a color profile using colorchecker passpoer and taking pic of a colorchecker digital SG using the profile created by the passport...
Don't do it, just use the colorchecker and be happy with the toy and happy shooting!