Today we're going to attempt to make
a DIY Colour Checker, but I'm going to be honest.
I'm only doing this out of complete curiosity
and I'm extremely doubtful that it's even going to work.
So, on that note...
Let's get Undone.
[offbeat music]
♪ Gerald Undone ♪
♪ He's crazy ♪
What's happening everybody? I'm Gerald Undone
and live from New York, it's Saturday night.
My thinking for this video is that
even if we completely fail to make a working
DIY Colour Checker, we still would have hopefully
learned something about the X-Rite ColorChecker
and about working with colour in our edits.
So, my first step was to bring
my ColorChecker Passport Video to Home Depot
and grab any paint swatches that reasonably
resemble the six primary colour chips.
I'm using exclusively paint swatches
from Behr because they can be found at pretty much
every Home Depot, but I'm also going to show you
an online tool that you can use
to match these colour samples
to other ones online that might be more available to you.
Now, I don't have any B-roll of me picking out the colours
at Home Depot except for this little snippet that I grabbed
on my phone for an Instagram story, but luckily
today's sponsor Storyblocks can hook us up with some stock
footage so that I can accurately recreate the harrowing journey
that was my Home Depot excursion.
[stirring orchestral music]
♪
OK, so I might have embellished my trip a little bit and that's
because I kept finding clips that I liked on Storyblocks
because it's actually a really great source
for quality stock footage as well as
After Effects templates and some
fun backgrounds and overlays. The interface is fantastic
and it's a subscription model with a reasonable
yearly fee that gives you access to unlimited
downloads including 4K footage. And the clips
are royalty free for personal and commercial use
so you can use them as much as you want wherever you want.
So, if you think you can take advantage of a fantastic library
of quality footage and effects check out Storyblocks using
the link in the description below. So, the next step was
to take these swatches that have multiple colours on them and
find the ones that more closely resemble the colour chips
and then cut them out into more workable sizes.
And now we're going to use these two tests which ones
are the most accurate using a vectorscope.
So, first we need a control and for this I'm using
the Sony A7 III with the Sigma 35mm f/1.4.
And I'm using the Leeming LUT with its recommended settings
for Cine2. This combination is one
that I found to be extremely colour accurate
and as you can see here it will give nearly perfect
results on the vectorscope. So in order to do this on the fly,
I've got the vectorscope showing on the Ninja V here,
which is seeing what the Sony's seeing which is
the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport Video, and we can see
that all of the primary colour chips on the Passport Video
are lining up extremely well with
the boxes that correspond with each colour around
the outside edges of the vectorscope.
And so now what we can do is we can take our swatches
here from Home Depot and we can stick them in there
and see if the line that's created falls very similarly
to the line that was created by the X-Rite ColorChecker
and then we'll know that our samples are at least
relatively close to the chips on the X-Rite.
I've also done a custom white balance
on the Sony for this scene and dialed in my exposure,
so now all we basically have to do is maintain
that lighting, exposure, and white balance
as we swap the paint swatches in and out. Alright, so I'm gonna
move over here and start swapping in these swatches.
I'll try and describe what I'm seeing but the audio
will probably be pretty bad. But just pay attention
to the vectorscope up here on the Ninja
and you can see the line shift around
and see if we can find one that basically gets hidden
or replaces the X-Rite line. So, let's start with the greens.
So, this one we can see is a bit more on the yellow side
than the X-Rite one is, it's coming a little bit more yellow.
Let's try a different one. This one has the same problem.
Maybe not as much yellow, but it's not
quite as saturated as the chip that's provided there.
And I've got one more here to try.
And this is an example of one that's pretty bad.
So, it's not nearly saturated, it's definitely more yellow,
and it doesn't have the same punch. Now, this one however
is actually doing pretty good. It follows the line pretty well.
It may not be exactly saturated.
There's also a glossy version on the other side
that we could use that seems to get a little bit
more of the saturation achieved.
But this one's following the line nicely.
So, this one might be our best bet for the green colour.
Let's do one more example of
doing the orange/red chip and then I'll just speed up
the video when I do the rest of them.
OK, first try that one's actually pretty good.
It's lining up pretty well and the saturation
is there as well maybe a little bit on the yellow side,
but not too bad. I'll see if I have another one
that's a little bit better. This one I would say
is the same. This is very close, this colour.
Guess I would choose this one. It seems to be a bit better.
♪
OK, so I've narrowed it down to the best six that I could find.
So, ,now let's put them together in the scene and see
how they compare in concert against the X-Rite.
OK. So, take a close look at the vectorscope here and try and
slightly memorize the position of the lines and the dots
and how they correspond to each other and I'm going to swap
it out quickly with our swatches and see how well they perform.
OK, so we didn't do too badly.
It's obviously not quite
as good or as accurate as the X-Rite
and the vectorscope just kind of making this funky-looking
spider web pattern now, which is actually
kind of cool looking but this isn't terrible and actually
I think that this warrants a further test.
So, now let's use these for a more practical scenario
where we'll actually try and correct a log image
that doesn't already have, you know,
the Leeming LUT to correct it and we'll see if we
can get the colour accurate using these on a log image
and then maybe compare it and see what would have happened
if we would've used the Leeming LUT
or if we would have used the X-Rite chart
Now, like I said, I got all of these from Home Depot
and I'll put the colour codes
for these in the description below
but I'm also going to put a link to this tool
from EasyRGB where you can actually put in
the colour code from a paint swatch-- so for instance
I'll take this yellow one here and it's called P330-5M Midori.
So, if we type that in here... Midori...
we can see "P330-5M Behr Colour Collection."
that's what this one is. Now, if we click on it...
And we can choose all collections but you can
narrow that down if you have a specific collection
that you're looking for... I'll just click "Compare"
and it'll show us a bunch of different brands here
as well as the formulations and the name
of the colour code, so if you find something here
from, you know, California, or ACE Clark,
or there was a, you know, Benjamin Moore, there's Dulux.
If you find something in there that will match something
you have better access to than these Home Depot colours
then you can go and pick up the swatches
from your store, whatever is more convenient.
Or you can even use these to generate
an online web colour if you wanted as well.
So, I'll put a link to this tool in the description so that
you can match the colours to best serve your purpose.
♪
OK, so I've got the clips opened up here in Resolve
and I'll just walk you through how you can correct
using this and we'll see what the results are like.
So, this first shot is the one where it's just me.
I put my arm in here into the shot and we've got
a few different colourful things spread out
and here's our little ColorChecker lined up here.
So, we're going to move over to the colour panel.
And I'll show you what you do if you want
to correct something using curves.
So, we're going to switch over to
the colour curves here. This is "Hue Versus Hue."
This is where we can start, and we have our vectorscope
on the side here. Now, this was shot using some light
that isn't ideal, usually causes some colours to be weird.
So, we're going to try and fix those to make them
line up on the vectorscope, and then
see if we get a decent result or if things go weird.
Like the Rubik's Cube changes, or the skin
no longer looks like skin, that kind of thing.
So, first as we can see the vectorscope
is kind of a mess right now, that's because
we're picking up all kinds of different colours.
So, the easiest way to do this probably
is just to zoom in, we can just activate
the transform controls here and I'll put this probably to...
let's set it to, like, 2.8.
That's just going to scale it in at 2.8
and pretty much just our colours and not be confused
by anything else. So, I'm going to move everything else
out of the shot so that we don't have the skin or anything.
We just have our colours here. Now when we switch over
to colour panel, our vectorscope is
a little bit simpler and it's making that weird
spider web pattern that we saw on the Ninja V.
See how there's these lines running along here?
so we can go ahead and put points on those lines.
And that will pretty much set us up.
And we also need to put one right at the boundary here.
So, if we raise it up, we can see that it moves more towards
red and if we bring it down and moves more towards yellow.
So, let's raise it up until it lines up with the red.
And the reason why you want to do this with curves is that
you get a smoother transition rather than just a spike.
Now, let's move over to the magenta point which is
actually kind of hard to see because it's just this little
one right here. The magenta doesn't seem to have a lot
of saturation, but we'll deal with that in a second.
So, just get it kind of lined up to magenta
and then we'll keep moving our way down.
So, blue... blue is pretty good.
We'll put that there. The cyan one
we'll try to line it up, and then green...
Same idea, and then yellow finally.
We'll put that in position. Now we need to deal
with the saturation because these aren't evenly
saturated but I think this is where we're going
to run into problems with our DIY chart.
So, move over to the "Hue versus Saturation." Same idea,
let's put points on all of these. Now, if we wanted
to make the saturation relatively even between them
and say that we wanted to use how far the red is
as the base one. Then we just need to increase the saturation
of others and maybe bring the blue down.
So, let's start with the magenta because it's the one that has
the least saturation, so we're going to jack that way up here
and then we'll bring the yellow down a little bit.
The green can stay probably where it is.
The cyan needs a bit more
and the blue needs to be toned down.
So, now... I think the magenta still needs a bit more.
Basically we're just trying to make it relatively even.
I would say that the green could maybe
use a little bit of a boost.
And then the cyan a bit more of a boost.
So, what we're going to do is we're going to go back
to the edit and we're going to un-zoom
but first if you want to just turn it off and on--
That's what it looked like before.
and that's what it look like after.
I feel like we're getting a bit too much of a rosy hue here.
So, let's go back to the edit page
and we will un-zoom our image.
Let's put it back and yeah,
so, you know what it's not terrible, but definitely the--
something in this-- I think it might
have been the magenta that was causing the problems.
We definitely have too much magenta in our reds.
Our reds are very, very-- We have a pink, sort of
a pink thing going on everywhere and it was the same
thing that I noticed when I went through all
the swatches in that rapid time
was that the magenta swatch is very difficult to match.
I went through pretty much everyone at the store
and I couldn't find one that was
saturated enough, but also, I guess like neutrally magenta.
They all seem to have-- maybe that's because
people don't want to paint their walls that colour.
But I had a really hard time matching that
and so while I wouldn't say that this is terrible,
it's not great.
Now, let's switch over and see what happens
If we were to just put the Leeming LUT on it
which corrects all the colours for us
and we can see what the Leeming LUT intended
image result would be. So, that is this one here
and as we can see there's no correction done.
If we look at our curves here, they're all exactly neutral.
But all of our points are pretty much perfectly
lined up on the vectorscope and now
let's take a look what that image looks like zoomed out.
It looks like this. So, a little bit contrasty-er,
but the Leeming LUT gives you more of a finished image.
So, just based on looking this I think I'm gonna add a little
bit more contrast and take away
a little bit of saturation, just overall saturation
from a paint swatch version and then see how
it compares in a side-by-side to the Leeming LUT version.
So, the main difference that I notice
is that the Leeming LUT has much better reds.
The reds over on our paint swatch version
are much more contaminated with pink, where the Leeming LUT
has the appropriate amount of orange in there and I think
that's going to create a better skin tone overall
then ours which looks a little bit rosy here.
So, overall not bad it's much better than I thought it was
going to be but in practice I think you're still better off
getting one of these Passport ColorChecker things
because when it comes to getting accurate colour it doesn't
really make sense to go through the trouble of making a tool
that only gets you somewhat accurate colour.
you probably should pursue actual accurate colour
if that's your goal. And plus this, you know, this comes
with some other things. It's got like a hard outside case.
It's rugged, it fits in your pocket well.
It's got other tools like the exposure bars.
And on this side, you've got
the white balance card as well as a focus checker.
So, it's a handy little tool and it will actually get you
accurate colour instead of sort of accurate colour,
but knowing which paint colours are similar to the X-Rite
will allow you to do something that you can't do
with the ColorChecker which is to paint your wall
to look like a ColorChecker,
which would be a pretty cool idea for a studio.
But anyway, this was a fun experiment
and I thank you for coming along for the ride.
But that's going to be it for me. I hope you found
this video helpful or at least entertaining
and if you did make sure you leave it the old thumbs up
and consider subscribing if you haven't already.
But if you did not find this video helpful or entertaining,
feel free to hit the dislike button twice.
Alright... I'm done.