Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
I’ve been using the ColorChecker Video and ColorChecker Passport Video since around the time they were first released a little over four years ago and you can read my review here. But when it comes to inserting them into your workflow, they can be a little confusing for people who’ve never used them before.
In this video, Gerald Undone takes a 26-minute deep-dive into how to colour correct your footage and grade log footage using the ColorChecker Video (and CCPV) in DaVinci Resolve.
All photographers and filmmakers have accessories and doohickies in their bags to help them with their pursuits. And now that we’ve covered cameras, lenses, lights, bags, tripods, sliders & gimbals out of the way, it’s time to crack on with those in today’s final 2019 DIYP Gift Guide. Here are some of the things we find absolutely invaluable in our work and some of the new tools and toys that have come out this year.
Over the past several years I’ve found the ColorChecker Passport to be an invaluable tool for my photography. It lets me get consistent colour weeks or months apart, even using different cameras. But it has one slight drawback. It’s only really compatible with Adobe Lightroom and Photoshop. And more recently, DNG Profile support was added to Skylum Luminar.
But one of the things that’s kept many people from adopting the ColorChecker is Capture One support. It’s also one of the things that stopped many ColorChecker users from switching away from Lightroom to Capture One. But now, all that changes as X-Rite announces Capture One support has been added to the ColorChecker Camera Calibration software v1.2 (Public Beta).
It’s funny, I was just thinking the other day that X-Rite should release a giant ColorChecker for drone photographers. And, well, they haven’t quite done that (yet). But what they have done is release a giant ColorChecker Video for aerial filmmakers. X-Rite has today announced the new ColorChecker Video XL. It’s like the ColorChecker Video, but bigger. Much bigger.
Recently, I posted a video on my YouTube channel on profiling my phone’s cameras. I do this because I like shooting DNG and then processing on the desktop. But the video raised a question from a couple of people about whether the X-Rite ColorChecker could fix the colour cast with long exposures using neutral density filters.
It’s something I’ve wondered myself. I don’t really shoot a whole lot of long exposures with neutral density, so I never got around to testing the idea. I have now, though. In this video, I compare three pieces of glass for long exposures. The B+W 10 stop ND, a very cheap Andoer variable ND and a piece of welding glass.
Accessories are the unsung heroes of photography. They’re the items we own, that aid in our photography, but of which we rarely speak. They help get us out of a bind, or become invaluable to our workflow.
Here are some of our favourite accessories that we use on pretty much every shoot.
Colour management can be such a pain. You’ve got cameras and printers to profile, monitors to calibrate, all in an effort to reproduce accurate colour. To make sure that your camera sees colour the same way you do. And ensure that what ends up on paper is exactly what you see on your monitor.
X-Rite are making that a little easier today, though, announcing the new X-Rite i1Studio. It’s essentially two products. The first is a standard 24 patch colour reference target, used to create DNG camera profiles. Basically, half of the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport. The other is the new calibration & profiling device for monitors and printers (amongst others).
When it comes to getting consistent colour with your stills photography, regardless of the lighting conditions, camera model, or even brand, I can’t think of anything I’d rather have with me than the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport (CCP). It just works, pretty much flawlessly.
For video, though, it’s not quite as useful. So, when X-Rite announced that they had released two new products aimed specifically at video shooters, the ColorChecker Video and the ColorChecker Passport Video (CCPV), I had to check them out and see for myself.
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