Color Checker for Landscape

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Kevin.M

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I shoot raw and I have been adjusting my white balance by eye in the field to get as close to what I see. I'm considering purchasing a color checker, do others just adjust in post or are you using a color checker and how are you using it, shoot 18% grey first then the color panel or just 1 shot and shoot? Thanks for any information you can provide.

~ Kevin
 
A 18% Grey card is not necessarily neutral. Neutral would return equal values for r, g, and b, where a grey cards purpose is focused on exposure, not neutrality. A colorchecker passport card yelds a neutral Grey scale and a larger Grey card, as would a white balance card.

That said I usually trust my eye to slightly warm or cool the scene using the white balance slider and tint slider to adjust the 'as shot' auto setting. If you go one direction til you see it clearly going toward cool then the other way till it is clearly toward warm, then somewhere in between your eye will put you at neutral or you bias it on purpose a little. A sunrise or sunset might look better a little warmer, for example.
 
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By eye, in front of the computer. Since it's RAW, I don't bother adjusting anything except exposure and composition in the field. No card, just use the picker on something I know is neutral as a baseline before doing further grading.
 
A white balance target doesn't have to be Grey. Any target that is neutral white or Grey with equal rgb,as long as the white has no blown channels and the dark has no clipped colors. It is not needed to set it in camera, just take a picture of the target in similar light and use the eyedropper in the raw converter, then copy that setting to your image.
 
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Most photographers realize the importance of calibrating their computer monitor. It is also beneficial to calibrate your camera and create a custom color profile for that camera. Then the source data ( i.,e. the RAW file) can accurately display the colors at the time of capture. I'm not so obsessive about color that I take a photo of the Color Checker Passport each time I'm out shooting. But I DO create a custom camera profile for the camera body for shooting in daylight....which is where generally my wildlife photography is done - in daylight.

Then in most raw processing s/w, you can select that custom camera color profile and set it as the default for that camera. This profile is used instead of the the canned profiles such as daylight/sunny, cloudy, incandescent, fluorescent, etc. profiles.
 
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Kevin.M said:
I shoot raw and I have been adjusting my white balance by eye in the field to get as close to what I see. I'm considering purchasing a color checker, do others just adjust in post or are you using a color checker and how are you using it, shoot 18% grey first then the color panel or just 1 shot and shoot? Thanks for any information you can provide.

~ Kevin
Click to expand...

I use a Clolorchecker to profile all of my cameras as I'm a bit colour blind. I probably go OTT as I have a lot of profiles for each camera. To use it you just select the profile you want and have loaded into LR or Capture One. It takes about 2 minutes to create a camera profile including the LR restart.

Summer, Autumn, Winter and Spring each have: Sun cloudy/Sun, Bright, grey day and window light.

The danger of setting colours/WB by eye is that most people don't know if they are colour blind if it is not too severe. I didn't until I had to do titrations for my chemistry exams at high school. In my early digital photography days I used to do mono conversions using the PS channel mixer and I thought that the results looked good until people told me that all of my monos had a magenta cast! Also I just could not do colour printing back in the day.

In some of the videos I looked at, the photographers even created camera profiles if they were in a place with specific light characteristics (some of the western national parks) or casts (like a green cast from being under a tree).
 
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