SpyderCHECKR

Datacolor’s 48-swatch camera profiling colour chart now finally fits in your pocket with the Spyder Checkr Photo

Sep 19, 2022 by John Aldred 1 Comment

Well, here’s one I missed while I was away in Amsterdam for IBC 2022, but it looks like Datacolor has finally released a pocket-sized version of their Spyder Checkr (review here) for easier use on location. It’s called the Spyder Checkr Photo and contains the 48 familiar swatches found in its bigger and older sibling. The card is also swappable, allowing you to flip them around for 12 more grey scale swatches for checking brightness and contrast as well as large targets for white balancing.

It sure has taken them long enough to make it easier to get the Spyder Checkr out of the studio, although like the larger version, it still feels a little bit lacking in the software department. Essentially, it uses the same software plugin, meaning you can create a HSL profile for Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Camera RAW or Hasselblad Phocus but that’s pretty much it.

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How to Get Consistent Color from Multiple Cameras

Mar 13, 2018 by John Walrath 1 Comment

This tutorial was graciously supplied by Datacolor

Using multiple cameras is common practice for some photographers. For example, wedding and event photographers often use more than one camera at a time. In some cases, there will be more than one photographer using multiple cameras. To complicate things, these photographers might be using cameras or lenses from different manufacturers. No matter how many cameras are used on a shoot, color harmony is important to help tell a cohesive visual story. Datacolor SpyderCHECKR can help make this easy and precise.

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Here’s how colour charts let you get perfect and consistent colour every time

Dec 27, 2016 by John Aldred Leave a Comment

After calibrating your monitor and profiling your printers, the next important step in colour accuracy is profiling your camera. There are several devices out there to let you do this, but there’s two main ones. One is the X-Rite ColorChecker (or Passport), and the other is the Datacolor SpyderCHECKR (reviewed here). I still use both systems, and always pack at least one of them for a shoot.

But do you really need one? And how do they work? This video from The Slanted Lens talks us through some of the colour problems we can face on a shoot, and how colour charts can overcome those issues. While not everybody will care all that much about colour consistency, once you start using one, I think you’ll find it difficult to go back shooting without it.

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DIYP Reviews the DataColor Spyder5CAPTURE Pro Suite

Sep 18, 2016 by John Aldred Leave a Comment

When DataColor announced the Spyder5CAPTURE Pro package a few weeks ago, I had to get my hands on one. So we had a chat with DataColor and they sent one over for me to check out. The whole bundle includes four of DataColor’s popular calibration and profiling tools. There’s the SpyderLENSCAL, the SpyderCHECKR, SpyderCUBE and Spyder5ELITE.

My current workflow comprises a mix of X-Rite and Lastolite tools. A ColorChecker Passport, the i1 Display 2 and an Xpobalance. They’ve served me extremely well, so the Spyder5CAPTURE Pro suite has a lot to live up to. The DataColor setup does, however, offer some very distinct advantages over my current system, which we’ll get to throughout the course of the review.

So, let’s have a look at what’s in the box.

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