ColorChecker vs Built-in Camera Color Profiles in Lightroom

dandaluzphotography · May 11, 2011

Hey Guys,

How much better is the Colorchecker passport at calibrating different camera bodies than the built in calibration for the different bodies in Lightroom? Anyone have any experience with this?

Thanks,
Danny

dandaluzphotography · May 12, 2011

Nobody? Maybe I posed the question incorrectly?

Danny

Garbz · May 12, 2011

Give it time, people will respond

In my experience the Colour Checker renders photos very similar to the ACR3.3 profiles, in other words far better than the AdobeStandard profiles. I have always found the Adobe standard profiles to put an unnatural purple tinge on skintones, as well as create real problems for saturated deep blues, again rendering them too purple. This may be limited to my camera model though, I don't know.

The Colour checker fixes this. I find skies and skin tones to be far better, as well as nature photos. AdobeStandard profiles put this unnatural colour separation between slightly dead grass and bright green grass. That said I also find my Colour checker photos to be a tad green when I use auto whitebalance and have a tendency to push the whitebalance tint to the purple ever so slightly.

But the one big drawback is that the AdobeStandard profile is made from a far larger range colour patches and includes not only more anchor points but different algorithms rather than a straight two colour comparison between daylight and tungsten. The effect this has is that sunsets look MUCH better on the AdobeStandard profile. I'm not talking look better from a colour perspective but in the sunset when the transition from Yellow to red to blue occurs the transition is far smoother using the AdobeStandard profile than the colour checker one. I've tried everything to fix this but so far have come up dry.

In general my default import involves my colourchecker profile, but I automatically convert sunsets back to AdobeStandard as the colour accuracy of the colourchecker doesn't outweigh the smoothness in my opinion.

If you have any doubts, remember it also makes an excellent grey card, and I recommend getting it anyway.