Toronto Photography Meetup Group

Just wondering if anybody uses this system in their workflow and can provide some feedback; pros and cons

Thanks

X-Rite Colorchecker Passport was one of the best $100+ change dollars I have ever spent.
(Especially, since most of it was a $100.00 Henry's gift card that I had lying around for a while)

You may want to make a profile for each shot, so your camera+lens profile is always perfectly matching.
However, I found that in similar lighting situations the difference between profiles is almost indistinguishable.

Once your profile is created and loaded to graphic software (I use Lightroom for it, not sure what else is compatible), you will just need to apply profile to your series
of pictures under the same lighting conditions (and the same camera and lens) and your pictures are immediately become calibrated.

As far as I understand, even if your monitor is completely off colour balance (and as long as you not going to do further colour changes in the picture),
resulting image will show perfect natural palette when viewed on balanced monitor.

If you concerned about accuracy of colours and how fast and uniformly you can process them, go ahead and buy the X-Rite Colorchecker Passport.
(For "purists" one of the Passport's sides is a grey card )

Thanks.

Glad to hear because after viewing some videos and tutorials online, I'm surprised that not more people are using this system (or similar)

I guess it depends how important colour accuracy is above and beyond basic white balance. I think if I were doing photos where the subject was product or food photography, then I would use this. But since its mainly people and some landscape photography, I only need my white balance to be corrected in post so I use a 3 shaded gray card. Almost all my finished photos have some colour adjustment based on my taste for the finished product.

It all depends on what you want from photography and difficulty of the lighting conditions.
If you are always more or less drastically changing colours then it might not be that important to get them precise from the start.

At the same time, if you have two or more different light sources, good luck tweaking picture to display colours properly when needed, even when shot with the grey card.
I may or may not change colours in the final version of the image edit, but prefer to start with the balanced source. It just makes initial part of the post-processing workflow drastically easier.