The Color Checker Passport Is Your Friend

Never Leave Home Without It

Accurate skin tones and accurate color is a must when photographing executive portraits and headshots. To ensure accurate skin tones I always take my Color Checker Passport with me to my shoots. Before the Passport was around I took a large 8.5 x 11″, clunky and often damaged Gretag-Macbeth Classic or Original color checker with me to portrait sessions. It was oversized and difficult to bring outside of the studio, and it came in a paper cover sleeve that always got torn and was easily bent.

 
A few years ago, along came the Color Checker Passport a scaled down version that is protected in its own hard plastic, clam shell, case.
Before each executive portrait and headshot session I do some test shots. When there’s no assistant to stand in for me, I’m the test dummy. I want to make sure two things are just right. 1) Make sure the lighting is dialed in perfectly. And 2) take a test shot with my X-Rite Color Checker Passport. This will ensure that after the session post production is sped up by not having to guess about the color balance. Instead, I click on the grey patch {at the very bottom} just to the right of the white square. This neutralizes the image of color casts and typically dials in a pleasing skin tone. I’ll occasionally need to tweak the image a bit, by warming it up, or cooling it down and sometimes removing some red from a ruddy complexion. Its a bit pricey at $99. But I’ve had it for a few years now and look at it as a necessary tool, which its still in pristine condition due to the hardshell plastic case.

Here’s what I like about it.

• One click color correction. Mostly. Sometimes, It needs to be dialed in and tweaked just a tad
• Grey card included on the flip side for custom white balance
• Software included to create a custom camera calibration {from the Color Checker Passport desktop application} and store it in Adobe Lightroom
• 5 x 3.5 inches in a hard palstic case
• Compatible with Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom
• Compatible with both PC and Mac
• Takes the majority of guess work out of color correcting skin tones and color management