Color Work Flow

Color Work Flow

Color management at the time of image capture can save a lot of guessing and headaches down the road. One of the most difficult things to remember after a day of, or even one shot is the color of the image subject. One of the thoughts that has remained with me since being a student at Sheridan College was ; 40% of society is color blind in some form. This makes color management critical. Luckily digital photography introduced a lot of innovative solutions.

The simplest form of color correction would be to have a known value in one of your images using the same lighting and angle as the subject. This could be a grey card or small color chart with grey scale such as the one MacBeth made. This would they enable you to set the white point when processing the camera file to a known value. This also provides another reason why to always capture images in RAW format, as any other format has been processed by the camera. Once we have a known value in our image that is neutral we can use that point to set the color for the rest of the image and it will produce a reasonably accurate image.

To take color accuracy to a more consistent and accurate level we need to use a broader range of tones and colors within our known values. This is where the X-Rite Colorchecker comes in as a must have item in your camera bag.

The nice feature about X-Rite is it is a complete system. Not only do you set the colorchecker in the image to be captured, you are also provided with software that will asses the chart and create a camera profile. This profile can then be used in camera RAW when you are processing the image. The big advantage to this is the software not only checks the neutral colors it also checks all the colors shown in the right side panel. The image below shows a screen capture of the software analyzing the image.

Here is the color chart as used in a recent photoshoot. The first image on the top shows the shot in default as set by the camera (RAW file) while the image on the bottom has had the X-rite profile applied.

Once the color is set the image can be processed as normal.

The next step is to make sure the monitors are color corrected....