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ColorChecker Passport

12

Jan

Colour Correction – The Search for the Holy Grail

  • By admin

Terri Weeks, Brock University Varsity Women’s Curling Team, and enthusiastic curling instructor.

We’ve been struggling with getting colour correct in some pretty ugly shooting environments – arenas that are lit with sodium vapour, or fluorescent or some other synthetic, albeit efficient light source.

Yeah, sure, the camera has colour white balance settings, but even then we find ourselves fiddling with the white balance on every single selected photo in post.  Surely there’s a better way? After reading a lot of on-line resources about white balance, grey cards, and other scary exotica from the world of colour correction, we came upon the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport. This lovely little plastic folder and software CD provides a grey-scale and a colour target to shoot on location, and a Lightroom plug-in to read your colour spectrum from the location photo that you capture prior to your shoot.

We tried it on a photo shoot with the Brock curling clinic last weekend and the above photo of Terri is corrected with X-rite. Believe me, everything has gone from overall yellow to something resembling correct skin tone. Shooting in an ice arena is horrible enough with all the light bouncing off the white ice surface. Easy over exposure. And the red everything in the Brock uniforms creates another challenge. But I think this looks good – the whites are white and the skin tone, hair colour and splash of freckles looks pretty good to me.

But then, who knows what monitor you might be viewing this on? The challenge never ends.