Product Description

Combining the powerful color capabilities of the ColorChecker Passport and Adobe Imaging solutions into your RAW workflow will undeniably reduce your image processing time and improve quality control. Quickly and easily capture accurate color, instantly enhance portraits and landscapes and maintain color control and consistency from capture to edit. Achieve superior color results in a fraction of the time. ColorChecker Passport combines 3 photographic targets into one pocket size protective case that self-stands to adjust to any scene. Together with the software you get the ultimate in functionality, flexibility and portability. Starting with an accurate white balance ensures the colors you capture are true. Use the White Balance Target to create a custom in-camera white balance for a set of images and eliminate the need to correct each image later.With the Enhancement Target you can creatively refine the color of your images with just a few clicks. Add warmth to skin tones. Boost the deep greens or blues in a landscape. Put warmth and depth of film back into your digital photos. Or use as a visual reference for judging, controlling and editing images for shadow details, highlight clipping or color shifts. Adobe Imaging users – Lightroom, Photoshop, ACR or Elements – gain a new level of accuracy and precision. Use the Classic Target with the included camera calibration Lightroom Plug-In or desktop application to automatically create a DNG profile of your camera’s response to the scene. You’ll get consistent and repeatable results from image to image and camera to camera even if you return to the same location later. It’s fast, it’s effortless and it will bring your color control to a whole new level. The Classic Target also provides a built-in point of visual color reference and is compatible with Adobe DNG Editor. ColorChecker Passport is so convenient and portable you’ll want to take it with you to every shoot!

Product Details

• Color: Black
• Brand: X-Rite
• Model: MSCCPP
• Dimensions: 4.92" h x .4" w x 3.54" l, .30 pounds

Features

• Compatible Software For use with MAC or PC and DNG profiles,LightRoom 2.0 or newer,Adobe Camera RAW 4.5 or newer
• Macintosh MacOS X 10.4.11 or 10.5.X,512MB RAM, G4 Processor or higher, 350MB of available disk space application
• Windows, Microsoft Windows XP 32 or 64 bit or Microsoft Windows Vista 32 or 64 bit, 512MB RAM, 200 MB of available disk space
• Compatible Software For use with DNG profiles, LightRoom 2.0 or newer , Adobe Camera RAW 4.5 or newer
• Humidity range: 85% or less, non-condensing , Temperature range for normal use of the case: 104 degrees Fahrenheit / 40 degrees Celsius
• Monitor resolution of 1024x768 pixels or higher

Customer Reviews

Great way to calibrate color
Watch Video Here: http://www.amazon.com/review/R1UJXM7OB90O0P Shows how the product can perform white balance, color calibration and dual-illuminant color calibration using the included software and Adobe Lightroom on a Windows 7 PC. 4 stars as the out-of-the-box experience is poor -- not until you have gone to the website, read the instructions and downloaded & watched the video examples will you know what to do.

Perfect - everything I expected
Im a professional photographer and use the digital-camera color checker, which is a rather large and bulky device to say the least, it is also complex to create and apply profiles.

The new X-rite passport ROCKS..! plain and simple.. it is easy to use, naively with lightroom, and easy with PhaseOne Capture. The quality of the profiles is not quite matching the digital camera checker, but nobody in their right mind would expect that. The passport create a very use-able profile in a matter of seconds.

Here is how it works.

1. snap a shot with the passport in the same light as you are working.

2. select image in Lightroom, then select EXPORT and export to X-rite.. this will create a profile, I suggest naming the profile by the date and album it applies to.

3. restart lightroom, go to develop, select the profile in camera profile, then sync to the rest of the album.

NOTE - if you have several lighting environments in the same folder, shoot a passport shot for each light change, then apply to the images which matches that passport.

The card also have a set of off-white patches for warming or cooling portraits and another set for landscape, use them to set the whitepoint in a image to warm or cool as desired.

X-rite have made available a very well designed instruction video for download from their site.

Overall, this is a very successful product, it does what I expected and it does it well. If you shoot digital and am concerned about color management, this is a MUST HAVE product.

HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.

The difference between amateur and professional
There are two parts to this system: there is the software you install and use on your computer, and there is the "hardware" the color checker you use when you're photographing and to which you reference the software.It is a system that speeds up your workflow, increases your accuracy and efficiency, and leaves you with prints you can be proud of.

Before I go on, let me clarify that I use this system with Photoshop ACR, not with Lightroom. Since the software does not install as a Plug-In to Photoshop (as it does with Lightroom), I have to use it as a "stand-alone" program. This isn't a hardship, but it is a distinction, and my review is based on this scenario only.

Another important fact is that for the purposes of creating profiles, this program requires that at least the profile-generating image be in .DNG so, whatever program you use to process your RAW captures has to be able to save as .DNG.

The process is simple: you shoot a series of photographs under a particular set of circumstances; you select one that is typical of the conditions present in the whole series; you save it as a .DNG; you open the "stand alone" Passport program; you open that representative image and tell it to create a profile based on it; you give the profile a descriptive name. The profile it creates will automatically appear in the camera profile drop-down menu in the Camera Calibration tab within ACR. You open the rest of the images in ACR and apply the profile to all of them as the first step in your RAW processing.

So far, I have successfully created two profiles for one of the cameras. It will be necessary, over time, to create a separate profile for each shooting situation for each camera. For example, on my Nikon D-80, I shot the color checker under "indoor, bounced flash" conditions. I created that profile. I then opened the 22 images that I shot under those conditions and applied the profile to them as the first step as soon as I entered ACR. Sure enough, on my calibrated monitor, the colors were right on target. I had the right shade of deep red, the right shade of aquaish-blue, and a perfect capture of skintone for each different person (and this was a diverse group). Additional adjustments in the basic tab were needed later but, starting from an appropriate profile, I could apply batch settings and only tweak individual shots lightly. I waited to write the review until I was able to make prints of the images that looked so great on the monitor and, sure enough, they look great when printed as well. I'm absolutely delighted.

I would say that the time saved is considerable. For an advanced amateur, like me, it's definitely worth it. For a large-volume professional, it is probably essential. Not only do you save time in the processing part of the equation, you also save money by not having to reprint.

Of course, the matter of creating camera-specific varieties of profiles can be time-consuming, but you don't have to do it all at once. You create them as the need arises and then you have them there for all subsequent matching situations.

The unit also comes with non-profile related swatches. Among them it has several intensities of neutral grays to help you quickly establish white point or check for clipping, and several artistic interpretation swatches designed for changing the color temperature of your photograph to make it progressively warmer (more golden) or cooler (more blue) than it really was. The latter are further broken up into cooling or warming for people or for landscape pictures. (Really, very well thought out.) There is also a white balance swatch/card that will come in handy in mixed-lighting situations. Though I haven't had to use it yet, it's very handy to have it in the same unit that I'm carrying along anyway.

The only factor on the minus side is that you have to really struggle to find information, instructions, and explanations of the procedure, features and swatches. The process is absolutely straightforward once you understand it, but getting there is a struggle. The X-Rite company website is badly organized and of very little help (I already knew that since I own their eye-one calibration software which still hasn't been updated for Windows 7).

The "for more information click here" link in the interface takes you to a dead end. The CD has totally-irrelevant "training modules" that deal with general calibration issues with no reference to this product. The zipped "online tutorial" that has to be downloaded from within the interface takes five minutes to download using DSL and requires Flash Player. When you register the product, they send you another link to download the same online tutorial again as a "thank you" gift. I believe your best bet is the written documentation PDF (on the standalone proram it is in the help menu>documentation). It is 59 pages long, well-illustrated and rambles a bit (but, so far, everything I wanted to find was there). Make sure you check it out before starting and be amazed at the difference in your images.