We Card...Colors, That Is
Category: Design... Photography...
Posted Thursday, June 22, 2006 at 04:01 PM [GMT-6]

This is pretty exciting. I just got a notice that my ColorChecker Mini color card has just been shipped by the manufacturer, GretagMacbeth. I can't wait!

Um, you do have a color card to check the color fidelity and white balance of your digital photos and scans, don't you?

If not, join the crowd. This will be my first one, but it's long overdue. I had never thought about adding one to my gear bag until I received some professionally scanned images from a client, and each scan included color and grayscale cards adjacent to the image. It made adjusting the color range of the images in Photoshop a snap, and helped ensure that the web versions of the scanned paintings more closely approximated the originals.

Obviously, you can't frame most photos to include a color card, but where you have control over the environment -- or when you're scanning an image -- it's generally easy to place a card next to the subject. At the very least, it's a quick and easy way to ensure that the white balance of the images is correct, using the eyedropper tool in Photoshop's Levels command.

These little gems aren't cheap -- $59 for the small one and $74 for the larger version -- and they recommend replacing them every two years in order to assure color fidelity. But it's a small price to pay to speed up image processing while increasing a client's satisfaction level.