Back to School with the ColorChecker Passport

Today was the first day of the new school year for a lot of South African parents and kids and our household was no different. Amongst the chaos of making sure all bags are packed and lunches made there is also the traditional job of getting a few snaps of the kids before they head off to their first day.

For years I have been getting a photo of the two kids together just outside our front door, but this year would sadly have to be different. The rain opened up this morning and getting them in the usual spot would have meant that they would also have gotten drenched.

Pretty much the only place to head to was the front veranda for what seemed like 30 seconds to get a photo of the two of them.

ColorChecker Passport

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With the weather being miserable I knew that leaving the camera on auto white balance would also make for pretty dreadful images. This was an issue as the family wanted to see the photos ASAP and taking time to manually correct the images in post-production just wouldn’t cut it. I pulled out the ColorChecker Passport to help me nail the colours in-shot,  something that I don’t always do as when shooting RAW you have the luxury of being able to make non-destructive edits to the images after the fact. When I do use it for RAW images is when I need to create a custom profile because of mixed or tricky lighting.

The Fuji range of cameras have amazing Jpeg images and I knew that if I could just nail the colours I would be able to share the images without much/any need for editing. So, here are an image straight out of the camera with just the built-in Fuji goodness along with the custom white balance thanks to the ColorChecker Passport.

ColorChecker PassportIf you are looking to save a lot of editing time I can’t stress how handy the ColorChecker Passport is to both professional and amateur photographers alike. It helps you get great results right out of the camera, and if you prefer shooting RAW then the custom profiles you are able to create are better than anything I have seen from both Adobe and Capture One.

 

Next week I will put together a short tutorial on how to create custom profiles to use in either Lightroom or Photoshop, and how these differ greatly (in a good way) from the profiles provided by Adobe.

 

 

 

 

 

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