Often times, we’re digging through our always evolving inventory to find exciting products to talk about and share our experiences with said product. While it’s easy to focus our attention on the latest lens offering from the Sigma Art Series, or something like the RED Ranger, sometimes it’s important to talk about various products that don’t get all the press that the major releases will receive. So today, we’re going to be focusing on color, and in particular, the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport.

What an X-Rite ColorChecker is, is a series of color swatches that are used to, in a sense, calibrate the color within your images to the most accurate degree. While these tools are incredibly common in video productions (as multiple cameras need to match color), they are considered a specialty tool when in the photography studio. And there are multiple reasons why you may want to use a ColorChecker system for your next photo shoot.

• When you’re photographing something that needs precise accuracy in color.
• When you’re using multiple cameras and need each camera’s colors to match perfectly.
• When you’re developing a neutral point in color, before you start your post production and color grading.
• Finding an accurate white balance in complicated & mixed lighting situations

Creates custom ICC camera profiles for use in Capture One® and other ICC compatible software, including Black Magic DaVinci Resolve and Hasselblad Phocus. ColorChecker Classic is available in five sizes, from the smallest Nano to the largest MEGA, so you.

Perhaps the most important use of a ColorChecker comes with product photography. Many major brands have pinpoint colors that they use for their branding and require those colors to be perfectly accurate in all of their marketing materials. Coca Cola, for example, uses the iconic red color in all of its marketing (Hex Code #fe001a), whereas brands like Tiffany actually have a trademark on their iconic “Tiffany Blue” (Hex Code #0abab5). These colors are a major part of their brand awareness, and when having their products photographed, they need to make sure they’re hitting those colors with pinpoint accuracy.

And while most of us probably aren’t shooting the next global campaign for Tiffany’s or Coca Cola (kudos to you if you are), these principles still apply regardless of the brand you’re working with. A color’s representation in the camera can vary drastically based on white balance, lighting, and even the camera and lenses you use, so a ColorChecker tool is an asset when trying to represent the color you’re photographing.

1. Follow Derek Heisler's workflow in this 1-hour Capture One webinar. Learn about color grading, skin tones, layers and linear response curves.
2. The ColorChecker Passport is an ideal tool for photographers working in a variety of shooting conditions and workflows. Passport is great for medium format and DSLR shooting in both RAW and JEPG workflows. The Passport hardware includes three targets for white balancing and color correction, identifying and correcting image clipping, and creatively warming and cooling images.
3. ColorChecker targets have been used by Colour perfectionists for the past decade to create custom DNG profiles for Adobe Lightroom® and Photoshop® workflows. Now you can also build custom ICC camera profiles for use in Capture One® (or other ICC compatible software) when you combine ColorChecker target with X-Rite ColorChecker Camera.

Example of the shift in color changes lighting can make to a seamless backdrop.

Fine Art Backdrops using a Color Checker in their Product Photos to produce accurate rendering results

How to use a ColorChecker

Now that we have a basic understanding of the importance of a ColorChecker in certain scenarios, let’s talk about how to use one. Generally, people use a ColorChecker one of two different ways – to just set a custom, accurate white balance or for full-color adjustment.

Using a ColorChecker to set White Balance

If you’re looking to get an accurate reading of your white balance settings, and don’t need the precision of absolute color accuracy, a ColorChecker is a really quick and easy tool to use to assure you have an accurate white balance. Simply take a photo of the ColorChecker with the grey card within the frame, and use that grey space to select a custom white balance. If you’re doing this in the camera, it’s as simple as going through your menu to select custom white balance, and selecting the image. If done correctly, all images going forward will use that custom white balance (Assuming you have your White Balance set to ‘Custom’). If you’re tethering to a computer, all you need to do is take a photo with the grey card in frame, and using the White Balance eyedropper tool and selecting the grey card. Assure that you have the settings applied to sequential images, and your white balance should be set.

With a ColorChecker Passport, there are two ways to set the White Balance – with the large grey card, or using the grey scale on the color grid portion of the ColorChecker Passport. Of these two options, I prefer the latter, as it gives you color correction options later in the editing process. Each checker is designed to be a neutral grey color, so which one you select is dependent on your exposure.

Using a ColorChecker to set ICC Color Profile

The most useful tool when using a ColorChecker, is using it to set an ICC profile to use for your images. An ICC profile is a set of data the characterizes the color input of an image. In simple terms, its a profile used to assure accurate color rendering across the entire platform – from photographing to monitor display to printing. While this may seem nerdy and unnecessary to some (and depending on what you’re working on, it can be), it is exceptionally important when working on commercial projects that require accurate color. When photographing an image, your tool for capturing an accurate ICC profile is a ColorChecker system.

To create a custom ICC profile, all you need to do is put the ColorChecker grid in the frame, and snap a photo. You can then use this image as your reference file later in the editing process (or use it immediately if you’re tethering). You’ll want to take one of these photos with each new set or lighting setup to assure accurate reference files across the board.

The easiest way to use these files, is to later take that image, convert it to a DNG, and then process it using the ColorChecker Camera Calibration software from X-Rite. The system itself is pretty automated, just drop the image with the ColorChecker in frame, and it will autodetect it. From there, create the new profile (I’d recommend giving it a custom name), and the hard work will be done.

Then load up your favorite RAW processing software, and select the camera profile you had made with the ColorChecker software. From there, apply those same settings across all the images from the set. While the changes and adjustments to color (should be) pretty subtle, you’ll typically find you’ll get richer colors and more consistent contrast throughout the image.

This is just an introduction to how to use a ColorChecker Passport to get accurate color read out from your images. This is the most basic way of assuring accurate colors from your images, and recent tools with Capture One and X-Rite allow you do make these adjustments automatically within their software. Hopefully, this article was able to provide you with a basic insight on how to get an accurate color readout using a ColorChecker, and if you want to learn more about what you can do with a ColorChecker, X-Rite has put together an extensive manual going over the features.

Product Photography Requiring Accurate Color | Photo by Zach Sutton

Author: Zach Sutton

I’m Zach and I’m the editor and a frequent writer here at Lensrentals.com. I’m also an editorial and portrait photographer in Los Angeles, CA, and offer educational workshops on photography and lighting all over North America.

Any professional photographer knows that having color accurate images from one photo shoot to the next can be a challenge.

With various lighting conditions from shoot to shoot, this has not always been easy to obtain. Having consistent color and a strong color profile is crucial for all of you images to output correctly. The GretagMacbeth ColorChecker has been helping photographers with these problems since 1976.

Read on to find out how X-Rite’s ColorChecker Passport helps you create camera profiles for consistent, accurate color.

In this post, we will show you how to create and apply DNG profiles to your Camera using the ColorChecker Passport.

Creating a DNG profile is an important process that will balance the white point of your images and retain the original colors that you shot. For the example outlined below, all photos were taken using a Canon EOS 60D with a Canon EF-S 18-135mm lens.

For this process, we shot every image in RAW format. RAW file format allows us to apply camera DNG profiles that we create using the Camera Calibration software included with the ColorChecker Passport.

RAW file format: File that contains minimally processed data from a digital camera. Raw files are processed by a raw converter in a wide-gamut colorspace where precise adjustments can be made before conversion to a file format (such as TIFF or JPEG). These adjustments include color calibration and white balance.

In this example, we are using the 2 most popular ColorChecker Passport Targets (there are 3 targets total – all of which are included with every ColorChecker Passport). The targets we are using are:

• The Classic Target: The industry standard color reference target for creating DNG profiles and for evaluating specific colors.
• The White Balance Target: For creating custom in-camera white balance for a consistent white point in a set of images, eliminating the need to correct each image later.

Color Checker Software

The following Step-by-Step process will show you how to create camera profiles, set the white balance, and apply these changes to your images.

ColorChecker Passport with Adobe CS5:

1. In Photoshop, open the first RAW photo you took that contains the ColorChecker Passport. This image will automatically be opened in Adobe Camera Raw. If you do not have Camera Raw installed (or need to update it), it can be downloaded HERE. Click on Save Image.

2. After clicking on Save Image, a new window appears. The default options include dng format, which is what will be used to load the image into the ColorChecker Passport software. After clicking Save, Camera Raw will process your RAW image and create a DNG file.

3. Open the ColorChecker Passport software. Drag and Drop the DNG file you just created.

4. When the image has loaded, the software will automatically identify the patches in the Passport. You will see a green marquee around each patch and green registration marks on the 4 corners of the target (as seen below).

5. After the Passport has been recognized, click on Create Profile. This is saved in your Adobe Camera Profiles folder on the hard drive. By Default, the name of the camera used is the profile name.

6. When the profile is complete, close and relaunch Photoshop. This will refresh the profile library and will include your new camera profile in the profile list.

7. In Photoshop, open all of the images you are creating the profile for. This will automatically launch Camera Raw.

8. Select All of your images, and then click on the Camera Calibration tab located on the right hand side of the Camera Raw window. Under Camera Profile, click on the Name pulldown menu and select the camera profile you created in step 5. This now applies the camera profile to all of your photos.

How To Use Colorchecker Passport Video

9. Click on the White Balance Tool. Then click on the White Balance Target in the ColorChecker. This will set the White Balance for all images selected.

10. Click on Save Image. When the Save Options window appears, click on the File Extension pull-down menu to select JPG or TIFF (These will be your print files). Click Save.

With the above process, you will be able to create DNG profiles for your camera for each photo shoot. The patches in the ColorChecker Passport will not change, regardless of lighting conditions on each shoot. If you need to output all of your photos with color accuracy and consistency, the ColorChecker Passport is an excellent (and affordable) solution. And combined with the ColorMunki, your entire workflow from Camera to software to print will consistently produce accurate color results.

Any questions? Comments? Let’s hear ’em!

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