Why you should use a color chart and how to use one.
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Hi, this is Jay P. Morgan.
Today on The Slanted Lens we're gonna talk about why it's so important to use a color
chart when you're shooting on set.
Now, you can use this for a video and for stills.
But today, we're gonna concentrate on stills and how we use the blind shoot that we just
did.
I'm using the Datacolor SpyderCHECKR, which I love.
A couple of reasons I love it.
One, it's got a quarter-20 on the bottom so I can put it on a stand, makes it really easy
to have on set, and it's got also the quarter-20.
It's like a pretty little device on the top as well.
[Inaudible 00:01:03].
There you go.
So great little device in a case.
I just stick this in my camera case and I've always got one so I can pop it out and do
a quick shot and off we go.
If you're shooting stills, obviously, you're shooting it wrong and if you're in a huge
hurry, which we always are, get a color chart in there.
Get it in there on the first shot.
This is a great example.
I shot it in there with Andy.
If I didn't get a chance to really correct this, I can bring it back in the bridge, I
open it up in bridge, it brings it up here in cameratomy and the very first thing I do
is I simply take my little eye dropper here and I put it on the second square down which
is going to be the closest to 18% gray and it cleans up all my color.
There's a lot of applications for this because if you're shooting in a scene and your lights
are all 5,500 degrees and you set your camera at 5,500 degrees and you're thinking, "Well,
my color should be clean and perfect."
Well, maybe not.
Maybe the light bounces off the wall and it gives you kind of a greenish cast.
It maybe, you know, who knows what else is in the scene that can affect the color.
When you do this, you can simply look in at the square and it says, "What do I need to
do to make that a clean 18% gray?"
And then it gives you a beautiful color.
Now, you can adjust it from here all over the place.
You can decide, "Will I want my blacks to be darker?"
And you can go through a whole process of how you're going to deal with this from that
point, but it gives you a great color place to start.
So that's my first step.
Just get a color chart in there, get a shot and throw it on.
So keep it in your bag, throw it in there.
There's even a smaller one that Datacolor makes so you throw it in there and get a quick
shot and then go on.
It helps you get your colors be very consistent.
Now that I've color corrected this first one, all I have to do is just create a preset and
I save the settings, and I name it, Tooth and Andy.
And there we go.
I save it and I got my preset there so I can correct any of the others.
I mean, the reality is I can open all these up at once, I can correct one, I can synch
them all together when that's almost done.
So you can make this part of your post process or you can also use it and it's actually the
way I use it the most as part of your tethering process when you're on set.
So here we are on set with this great giant tooth.
We got capture one running, we've got our image coming up, the client seen the corrected
images.
I make some other adjustments to it.
It's applying that as it comes in.
But just throw up that color chart, very first chart you get on that is that it gets everything
balance to that, you correct it immediately, and it gives you a smooth color.
Now, I am not saying, don't be lazy with this.
Our example with this was just simply to give you a dramatic example.
Don't shoot your stuff on tungsten when you're in a daylight situation.
You wanna shoot in daylight with daylight lights and then you use this to just tweak
the color to make it really clean and to make it nice.
That's the way this is meant to be done.
So that's how I use it when I'm on set and when I'm tethered.
Now you can go one layer deeper with this and that is that you can now take this in
light room.
If I go to my develop mode here, I can just simply go up here, I can crop the image, pull
this little crop right here, I'm gonna bounce this around, I'm gonna get it a square as
I can to my SpyderCHECKR.
I mean, it's nice to make it a little larger if you walk-in but I do this all the time
at weird angles and things, I just make it happen.
So now, I've got it there, it doesn't even look at and focused actually, I can take my
dropper, I can clean up the color first so I know I've got my color cleaned up, I can
now take and I'm gonna want my blacks powder to be somewhere around, oh, I don't know,
about four and come down here.
I want this to be about a four.
Right now, it says, "Zero."
That's way too dark.
It's almost a one, I'm gonna open up a little more, that's like 3.0, 4, that's great.
We're on to 85+, that's excellent in there, that's perfect.
So now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go up here under photo, I'm gonna edit it SpyderCHECKR
editing.
It's gonna open up here.
It says, "Edit the copy of light room adjustments," that's correct.
Now, I'm gonna give us a color patch for each one of these color.
You see that?
I can move that around those little colors there.
All right, well, I wanna get that squared up on each one of the colors as best as I
can.
I am about to make a preset.
It's gonna give me some options.
First off, I can choose to do it as saturation.
Now, saturation preset is pretty saturated.
You might want to do it for landscapes and things, but you know, when you're doing landscapes,
you kind of making decisions on what you want that to look like.
I'm not sure if that's the best bet for you but the really nice one here is to do portrait.
Portrait kind of cleans up the reds a little bit in the skin.
These are not your basic color settings like your color balance.
This is a preset layer that's gonna just kind of move your stuff.
It's separating basically the HSL layer away from your color bounce layer so you can do
some fine tuning adjustments to it.
And this is gonna give us a nice, and I'm not gonna take this camera room, I'm gonna
take this back to light room, and I'm gonna save my calibration, I'm gonna call it Tooth.
Wow, portrait.
And I'm gonna save that.
Now, if I wanna apply this preset, I've got a quick light room to do it.
So I'm gonna click here, I'm gonna click light room.
Okay, so now after I make my adjustments here, I take my eye dropper, I clean up my color,
I can now can go in here in my presets and right there is my tooth wow, and I apply that
tooth wow and it just cleans up the color a little bit.
So there's more of an in-depth look.
If you're gonna really play with this, you're gonna want to come up with a preset that really
helps us do what you want to do with the kind of work that you're doing.
You can apply this to different things like I'm shooting inside on this images, I'm gonna
be outside on these and so you wanna clean the color up differently, gives you a lot
of different options.
And that's really delving in a little deeper in this software and helping to understand
a little bit of color.
You're separating two different layers of color to be able to apply them differently.
You know, we don't always have all the time in the world we want.
You don't always have time to get out the color meter, you may be going really fast,
but if you get one of these in for one frame, it's gonna solve two problems for you.
One is, if your color is right and your light is right, but you got some ambient kind of
colors in the room, it'll get rid of those tints.
Number two is if you just don't have the time to get out that color meter and everything
down right in, this gives you a point to go directly to clean color and to move forward
so it makes it very simple.
I love these things.
I'm using through my entire career.
It's the fastest way I've ever seen to get the clean color so check it out.
Keep those cameras rolling, keep on clicking.
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