Hey guys welcome and welcome back thanks so much for joining me i'm Jessica McGovern international
multi-award-winning portrait photographer and every single Friday i sit down with you guys to
share a tip technique topic or tool within five minutes hence Five Minute Fridays if you're new
here please don't forget to hit the subscribe button and hit the bell icon the bell icon will
give you a notification every single time i upload a YouTube video we upload every single
week on a Friday like i've already said because Five Minute Fridays and stuff and we do other cool
things as well so you don't want to be missing out on any of that today's video is brought to you by
us and also DataColor the creators of Spyder and essentially i'm going to be reviewing one of their
kind of tools showing you guys how it works and hopefully blowing your mind as much as it blew
mine but i guess you know i am a bit weird so it might just be me who knows so the product
i'm here to talk to you guys today about is the SpyderColorCheckr now i've got the big one
where there's loads of different squares in it but you can get the 24 version now
what is this it is to give you perfect colour and i'm not lying guys i will never do a photo shoot
without this ever again especially if there's human skin involved because oh my good god it is
freaking amazing we've talked a lot about white balance on the channel like a lot about white
balance on the channel because it's so integral and in all of the challenge review videos we pick
up white balance issues this solves white balance issues but then also goes above and beyond
to solve colour issues and creates just such a dreamy perfect level of colour in the images are
perfect it's so perfect i can't even believe it so without further ado let's look at this
product in a little bit more detail and i'll show you guys exactly how it works
i'm super super super excited to show you guys it's like genuinely i really am
so essentially it's like the Passport Checkr and essentially you open it up and it has a load of
different kind of swatches inside so we have grey swatches and other bits and pieces in there but
i've actually switched this around so when you get it if you get the big one with loads of other bits
you can pop open the sections take out your little checkr card and then flip it around
and that will give you the actual 48 version i personally like to be able to set my white balance
in the scene so i'm going to be going ahead and using the other side all right so i prefer to have
one side as this but this side is really important to leave as it is so this is the one with your
grey cards coming down the side it's always best to set white balance with this in E2 which is this
little square right there E2 is the best white balance square okay but you can kind of use any
of the grey squares you then have your colour swatches which Spyders software matches to their
kind of this is what that colour should actually be like in our system and it outputs a preset and
i'm going to go through all of that with you but how i've personally used this is i've gone out to
a location asked a model to hold it or if it's just photographing a dog or just photographing
a horse or another animal or an object that can't hold stuff then i will just help kind of hold it
in the scene with it or rest it against something or you can put them on a tripod because they do
have a screw point at the bottom there is another little important part about this which we're going
to talk about at another time but you can pop up a thread from the top there so there's like
another thread here that you can pop up from the top and you can pop your SpyderCube on the top
which again game changer but this one i wanted to start with because i just think it's amazing and
you know i wouldn't lie to you so anyway here is the different colours you have your subject hold
it in the scene and then you utilise a plug-in for Lightroom Photoshop Camera Raw or whatever
you want to use to output a preset that you then put on your images to make all the colours perfect
and because i know nobody's gonna believe me about this right i know you're all gonna be like Jess
you're lying i'm gonna show you i'm gonna i'm gonna i'm gonna show you i'm just gonna show you
so on the screen right now you should be able to see some pictures of Fada and Fada's owner who we
photographed in the woods the other day so these are raw files straight out of camera nothing has
happened to them they are literally as they were shot but we managed to get a couple of extra shots
with Fada and Fada's owner with the colour checkr that we have from Datacolor so the SpyderCheckr
here is set up literally just as i showed you it in hindsight i would have twizzled this around and
i'll show you why so how does this work well what we need to do is go ahead and enter the develop
section and with the develop section open we need to do a rotation and a crop to basically get these
squares on this side of the image the right way around so i'm going to go into the crop tool
unlock the padlock and then i'm going to bring the corners of the picture to the corners of that
inner square so we're kind of set there now you can at this point change your white balance that's
optional so E2 is this square here and then these other little sections are quite important so this
white point should be between 90 and 96 so if it's higher than that you want to bring your highlights
down a little bit or your whites down a little bit to make sure that we're sat nicely between 90 and
96 on the percentage points that you can see under here so i'm like a 95 which is okay what i might
do is just bring the overall exposure down and then reset my highlights back off which i'm happy
with so then the black point this is the point of contention that i have because with animals
and especially out in the woods in natural light this black point is rarely gonna be black
when the subject holds it so i kind of ignore it let's be honest i just ignore it but i do
you know give it a good go for a way out then i will bring it down but as it stands right now that
is fine so we've got our white balance point we've got our white point keeping it below that
96 level so 90 to 96 if you're going for awards i would recommend keeping that around 90.
okay just tip tip tip tips today from me okay then i need to rotate this so i'm going to right click
go in to transform and i'm going to rotate this left counter clockwise so that i've got my skin
tone swatch up here my black swatch down here my white swatch here and my teal swatch here
then i'm going to right click and go to edit in and i'm going to use the SpyderCheckr editing
now to get this here all you need to do is use the little card that comes with it there's a software
serial number on the back of it that you can go ahead and type in download the software when it's
installed make sure you quit Lightroom and reopen it and it should already be there like magical
stuff right magical magical magical stuff so we're going to go into SpyderCheckr editing and this
is the point where you set your export settings i just leave mine like that you can change that
in your preferences but it's totally up to you we then go into edit and it will open up the SpyderCheckr
after making a tiff copy of the file so then look you can see why my rotation and crop
was required so we've got that black point in the bottom right and you can see these little squares
that are kind of sat over the top now you can move them and make sure that they're relatively central
by wiggling around these little arrows at the side one thing the arrows don't do in my personal
experience is rotate hence my learning when we've got that and we're all kind of centralised it's
up to you which mode you choose i like the colour metric version but you can do portrait which works
super nicely on skin tones but colour metric does also so i'm leaving it on colour metric
and then i'm going to save it to Lightroom and i'm going to click save calibration
this is important because this means i can put it on all of the other images in the batch so
i'm going to call this Fada and then the location and you can also put the date it doesn't really
matter and i'm going to click ok and then i quit and then the really sad part about this
and the bit that i really want Datacolor to look at is that you have to quit Lightroom to have
that preset imported right so i'm gonna go and do a quit Lightroom classic and then i'm gonna
reopen Lightroom classic there we go so that little pop-up window that just came up says
all custom developed presets were successfully converted and now we have this preset over here
look how the colours change total change so i'm going to just go ahead and put that preset onto
this file and then all i then need to do is select all of the images that were shot in that shoot
and press sync and off it goes and so that profile will now be applied to all of my other images in
the set and that theoretically is perfect colour for the location so that's the before and that's
the after and you can see what it's doing if you go ahead and look in your HSL do you see all of
these little tweaks that have happened that's to equalise off your colour but it comes into its own
when we look at skin tones right so that's the before that's the after look at the difference
in the owner's skin tones and in the colour swatch so i focus on the swatch for this image but you
can get just for the colour in the skin total shift total total total shift and i can confirm
with 100% accuracy that the corrected version is exactly what my eyeball saw in real life
in that scene and so i'm left in a situation where i only then have to go through and do fine tweaks
and i can if i want to even further tweak the colour just to go ahead and kind of get a little
bit more control on that but it's more to do with them what i want to do afterwards rather
than the camera getting it wrong and trying to eyeball it back to something that looks bright
so would i recommend this Colorcheckr to every photographer in the entire world yeah yeah
i would i would i really would who is it going to be perfect for it's going to be perfect for
people who want or need really really good colour really really really really really good colour
people who want that or need it this is perfect it's also going to be perfect for people who
struggle to get the correct white balance or the correct colour in their images because
this is going to really really really help to skyrocket that process up even further so
it's really really good for people who struggle with that is the implementation process a bit
of a ball ache as we say in the UK um yeah i would say so i don't feel like it's 100%
kind of user friendly it's an extra step before the shoot
but then it's a way up between is that level of just utter perfection in colour worth it
worth the time it's going to take worth the effort it's going to take yeah for me it totally is so
am i 100% converted to using the ColorCheckr in every single shoot yes 110% yes but if that seems
like a bit overkill for you i've got something else i want to show you guys and i'll show you
guys that in a couple of weeks so thanks so much for watching this Five Minute Friday hopefully
this little process was interesting for you if it was drop it down in the comments below i'll put a
link to where you can get this product as well in the description below it is worth looking at
it really is so like i said i've got the SpyderCheckr 48 you don't need the 48 to get started
the 24 is more than enough to get working with and to be honest i think i probably went overkill
with the 48 i think 24 is perfectly fine and in the software you can change whether it looks for
the 24 or the 48 and so for me because i've used that grey sheet i've gone and looked for the 24
instead of the 48. don't worry about any of that just have a look at it because genuinely i think
it's worth its weight in gold so that's the wrap for that one i'll see you again next week