My new toy - a colour meter.

[SteveF]

Or more precisely the Sekonic C700R.

For long enough now I've hankered after a colour meter or spectrometer to be more precise. With the use of grey cards and WB targets I've managed without.

However when even my 1DX cannot get these damn energy-saving lights colour balance right I relented and in my sticky palms lie this wonderous bit of kit.

Not having seen mention of colour meters much are they much used by the members here?

[PhotomanJohn]

Steve - I have never used one so let us know how helpful it is. When I have an issue with funny light sources, I create a color profile using an X-Rite Color Checker Passport and associated software. Have you tried that method?

New toys are always fun!

John

[SteveF]

John - yes new toys are always fun!

Initially I wanted something to give me the exact kelvin reading so I knew what was being output so as to balance any light source to another in the scene. So gel a HMI to a LED or whatever might be on hand. Then I had a busy time with some flouros at a local dance studio and afterwards struggled to get satisfaction in pp even in raw. Whilst I quckly learned old flouros are belting out lower levels of blue spectrum even tho I shot at 1/40th sec to capture the 'wave' I hadn't got a handle on how much lower the blue spike was.

With this Spectromaster it shows the B/A and G/M box and where to place your pointer in the camera in 'white balance correction' in the menu of most dSLRs. It shows in one case B5/M2 so I moved the pointer to five clicks towards Blue and 2 clicks down towards Magenta and used the kelvin readout to set my camera manually to that kelvin reading.

Out pops perfectly colour corrected files. I then tried using this on AWB and allowing the camera to choose the kelvin value and keep the colour correction values in and it came very close under flouros but not constant energy-saving bulbs.

Now I'm a jpeg shooter by nature but I relented at this dance school and shot raw+jpeg. I colour corrected the raws in Canon DPP and made as folks commented a good job of it. It took a while to get the numbers right and it was tedious too. With this meter I can dial into raw files in post the exact figure or dial it into jpegs on site.

Now I can meter at each backdrop (I have three onsite for operational reasons) and dial in each setting in a custom setting on the camera for each backdrop. 20-25 young dancers (aged three upwards) at a sitting plus helpers plus confusion and portable lights do not make a safe environment! So I use the school's flouros. The sittings are 5 mins long and then in comes another class and I do this all day on a Sunday.

The C700R comes with a pocket wizard module. So it will trigger PW units as my 758 light meter does. This means I can trigger a camera with strobe on it with my light meter and have the colour meter 'open' to flash and capture the colour data and dial that into raw or preferably jpeg onsite or in post.

There's loads of other functions I'm exploring at the moment where you can meter to gel up to a kelvin reading with filters on lights or down as the case may be. There's B&W and Lee filters values in the display with CRI data etc. It really does make white balance and colour correction a cinch. It's the colour correction which is most useful to me as I find the dance school folks want all a Sundays output within a few days and now I can refine that down to a couple of hours.

[chauncey]

my 1DX...I'm a jpeg shooter by nature

The term incongruity comes to my mind.

[SteveF]

The term incongruity comes to my mind.

Sorry, but your comment is lost on me. Please expand.

[chauncey]

You're using top end gear, and you're shooting in jpeg...allowing the camera to do the PP.

[rpcrowe]

That is strange to me also but, if you enjoy doing it that way and get good results - more power to you!

I have not used a color meter since my film days... Shooting RAW and opening in ACR and using the white balance eyedropper tool, I get my color balance as close as I need. I very often use a WhiBal card (or use the white coat of my Maltese dogs) as my target.

Many years ago, I had a girlfriend with perfect color vision (Something like perfect pitch in music). She worked for a commercial advertising agency and balanced color by eye. She was awesome at it too!

[SteveF]

You're using top end gear, and you're shooting in jpeg...allowing the camera to do the PP.

Yes. That's how I work. I don't bother purchasing software for pp or calibrate my screens nor do I trust my eyes anymore. In fact 99% of my time is behind the camera.

[SteveF]

That is strange to me also but, if you enjoy doing it that way and get good results - more power to you!

I have not used a color meter since my film days... Shooting RAW and opening in ACR and using the white balance eyedropper tool, I get my color balance as close as I need. I very often use a WhiBal card (or use the white coat of my Maltese dogs) as my target.

Many years ago, I had a girlfriend with perfect color vision (Something like perfect pitch in music). She worked for a commercial advertising agency and balanced color by eye. She was awesome at it too!

I can understand you may think it strange, Richard. Shooting with top end gear etc but even shooting raw won't get me the lighting balance on site without replacing/moving/gelling some light sources which I suffer the most from. I frequently gel my speedlites to match ambient at weddings/dance schools and shows but when faced with these energy saving lights its just a guess without a meter because the white card/alternatives only tell the camera and not me. I wanted to know to get a better result and it sure does work well.

For instance I have a presentation this next month (when they get organised, that is) where the stage has halogen lights and the hall has weird things. So I can now meter for the halogen, check the numbers and put the filters over the speedlites in the hall to match the halogen. Hey presto no pp work or horrible results. Another venue has flouros in the main hall and incandescent on the stage. I get a lot of these venues now.

Last night I recorded the values of the dance school flouros went back to the images I shot last a while back and applied them to those rare raw files and the images came out better than my eyedropper. Bearing in mind I thought I was pretty good at getting white balance nailed this was a bit of a revelation!

One setting on this meter allows you to take several readings and average them out and the graph gives an overlay of say three readings which can be recorded onsite or if you shoot raw note them for pp. Multi-flash settings allow the individual tuning of studio lights as not all are 5600k or 5200k as advertised.

[xpatUSA]

The term incongruity comes to my mind.

I use a Sigma SDM1 top-of-their-line DSLR and habitually shoot in low resolution raw mode (2336x1568px) - for my own perfectly good reasons.

[HaseebM]

You're using top end gear, and you're shooting in jpeg...allowing the camera to do the PP.

Maybe because he is using top end gear?

[xpatUSA]

. . . . I frequently gel my speedlites to match ambient at weddings/dance schools and shows but when faced with these energy saving lights its just a guess without a meter because the white card/alternatives only tell the camera and not me.

Have you though about creating a venue profile and opening your shots with that? You tote a color patch card and shoot it the most relevant place. That gets you a more precise correction instead of the color picker which just produces 3 (RGB) multipliers and only gets you in the ball-park.

I have a CFL lamp at my computer desk and often shoot stuff there. My Sigma cameras consistently produce a brownish-red for the Macbeth red patch - even when I use Custom WB for the shot. And, in post, the neutral patches come out nicely neutral and no amount of clicking in them corrects the not-red red.

(some years ago, I actually sold my first Sigma camera because of it's non-reds under CFL lighting).

Only recently have I found an acceptable solution to that (I don't use gels).

Check it out:



At left, the shot used to make a profile. At right, the same shot with profile applied. The red is obviously fixed, eh? Also note patch #2 the caucasian skin color - which this camera shoots just a bit yellow-ish gets a tiny bit more ruddy.

Apps are available that can create profiles from card shots - I used one called CoCa (without the Cola) for the above and opened the shot at right in RawTherapee. Neither is essential to the task, other apps can do the same. Might be better that p1ssing around with gels and stuff, especially if the MC turns the hall lights off just before the band starts playing . . .

[xpatUSA]

You're using top end gear, and you're shooting in jpeg...allowing the camera to do the PP.

Just curious, how does a JPEG that was produced in-camera get to be called post-processed?

[chauncey]

Maybe because he is using top end gear

The PP software for jpeg within the camera is the same throughout the Canon DSLR line.

how does a JPEG that was produced in-camera get to be called post-processed

What else might you call camera sensor metadata that is then converted to an jpeg image?

[xpatUSA]

The PP software for jpeg within the camera is the same throughout the Canon DSLR line.

How odd. There I was thinking that an image comes out of a camera as a RAW, or DNG, even TIFF, or JPEG file. Then, and only then, do we (the humans) start our post-processing.

So it would appear that, in the wonderful world of Canon DSLRs, "post-processing" means something different?

Do Canon themselves actually use the phrase "post-processing" when referring to in-camera conversion to the JPEG output file?

Just doesn't seem right, somehow.

What else might you call camera sensor metadata that is then converted to an jpeg image?

Hoisted by your own petard, William . . the camera sensor does not produce meta-data. And meta-data is anything but image data and can not be converted into anything, it's just read as info.

Sorry.

[SteveF]

Have you though about creating a venue profile and opening your shots with that? You tote a color patch card and shoot it the most relevant place. That gets you a more precise correction instead of the color picker which just produces 3 (RGB) multipliers and only gets you in the ball-park.

I have a CFL lamp at my computer desk and often shoot stuff there. My Sigma cameras consistently produce a brownish-red for the Macbeth red patch - even when I use Custom WB for the shot. And, in post, the neutral patches come out nicely neutral and no amount of clicking in them corrects the not-red red.

(some years ago, I actually sold my first Sigma camera because of it's non-reds under CFL lighting).

Only recently have I found an acceptable solution to that (I don't use gels).

Check it out:



At left, the shot used to make a profile. At right, the same shot with profile applied. The red is obviously fixed, eh? Also note patch #2 the caucasian skin color - which this camera shoots just a bit yellow-ish gets a tiny bit more ruddy.

Apps are available that can create profiles from card shots - I used one called CoCa (without the Cola) for the above and opened the shot at right in RawTherapee. Neither is essential to the task, other apps can do the same. Might be better that p1ssing around with gels and stuff, especially if the MC turns the hall lights off just before the band starts playing . . .

Thanks for your input Ted. If I was shooting the same venue week after week this would indeed be a good idea and I can see anyone who is in your position shooting under the same lamps as you do will benefit greatly from this explanation.

The dance school I shoot for hold sessions for charities and often dance out in school gymnasiums/visitor centers etc and I wander in, look at the lighting and think to myself 'what the hell are those lights?' then get back to base and spend time fiddling to correct the colour. This meter will now allow me to dial in those numbers straight off the meter and I can probably get back to printing onsite like I used to do. Event printing onsite was something I did some years ago and it's profitable. Still have the dye sub printers here in my workshop ready to go again.

This new Sekonic is the most accurate colour meter to date - affordable, that is and hand held. Measures down to 1nm whereas most others to date only get to 10nm. Now I'm no whizz kid when it comes to knowing much about nm but I know enough to know it's proving very sensitive.

Now, my comment about shooting jpegs with 1-series Canons seems to have touched a raw nerve. I'm not sure why it should. It's my choice and my work sells nicely but there will always be someone who will say 'yeah, you might sell more if you shot in raw' ... don't bother with that one! I take about 100,000 images a year in all weathers, under dozens of different lighting conditions and even weddings. A holiday weekend might yield 3 cycle events with 100plus cyclists in them like one I've got coming up on the 4th April - 124 riders and I'll nail 3 images of each rider going both ways so will end up with about 740 images to sort through in the evening from that one race plus the presentation images after the event. Then I'm out Sunday and then again Monday night, Tues night and Thurs night next. I do that every week virtually until September. And ya know what I shoot in is not Large jpeg, or M1 but M2 and quality '10' giving me a nice little well-baked file of 3mb or less.

[inkista]

I feel as if this would be an appropriate time to post a link to a TOP article by Ken Tanaka on shooting JPEG instead of RAW.

[loosecanon]

An interesting thread - as someone who sometimes seeks to reproduce correctly colours through to printing stage.

Has a colour meter helped identify those light sources which appear similar to others, but which in fact produce specific spectral lines which look "white" but which induce colour shifts in the interaction with dyes and other colour forming chemicals?

The bane of mixed light sources has always been with us since colour photography, (and maybe even before) with replacing household light bulbs with "daylight filtered" ones, or putting blue filter inside lampshades to "correct" lighting. Fluorescent lighting where the phosphors can give very uneven colour light being a common problem, especially for reds and browns.

I currently use grey cards to set camera white point and include colour patches to calibrate both image and camera. What is clear is that different sensor + IR filter + processing do produce different colours in an image.

Finally I am surprised that some are happy with 8bit jpeg files rather than 16bit tiffs derived from 14bit raw files, but then some people believe in getting it "right" in camera. I frequently take images that I know will need pp, but which at first sight would have wrong exposure.

[xpatUSA]

Finally I am surprised that some are happy with 8bit jpeg files rather than 16bit tiffs derived from 14bit raw files, but then some people believe in getting it "right" in camera.

Easy to believe but all too easy to come a cropper!

All too often, I'll shoot something indoors in Custom WB and then wander outside and shoot several awesome incredible shots of a lifetime - totally forgetting to reset the WB before doing so.

Had I been shooting only jpegs . . hmmm . . . are there any neutral colors where I live? . . nope. Even if there were, my previous post says that the simple color picker doesn't hack it

I think we should all start off with raw composite exports and slave away with profiles, curves, 3-channel mixers until it looks right, by golly

[SteveF]

An interesting thread - as someone who sometimes seeks to reproduce correctly colours through to printing stage.

Has a colour meter helped identify those light sources which appear similar to others, but which in fact produce specific spectral lines which look "white" but which induce colour shifts in the interaction with dyes and other colour forming chemicals?

The bane of mixed light sources has always been with us since colour photography, (and maybe even before) with replacing household light bulbs with "daylight filtered" ones, or putting blue filter inside lampshades to "correct" lighting. Fluorescent lighting where the phosphors can give very uneven colour light being a common problem, especially for reds and browns.

Yes. The colour meter has given me a full spectrum of each light source and the means to input the numbers to result in correct shades, whites and blacks. On this meter one can read a light source in about 5 secs, note that and move on to the next light source, meter, note and so on. You don't need to input immediately into the camera and if you do shoot raw then you can take those readings back to base and input them directly into your PP.

To give an example of my testing and the results I'm getting; I read one flourescent light at 3150kelvin with a colour correction index of B5,A2.5. Then moved onto another and read 3550kelvin and correction index of B5,A2. This shows me most flourescents seem to need the same colour correction but the kelvin values change and they age, quality etc. Now that's put information into my head that a white/grey card doesn't so I'm learning as I'm going along. To capture the full 'wave' of some cycling lights with a grey/white card has troubled me in the past but the meter captures all this data and shows it on a graph.

There's a colour correction setting on my G1X and G16 too. So I can apply the correction without taking the meter with me as I learn what colour shift is likely to be. It's still early days and I do tend to take longer absorbing information nowadays but I guess it's a sign of age