I've wanted a ColorChecker as a nice-to-have for a while, but real ones are kind of expensive (understandably so) for me.
As it turns out, paint samples that you can get at the hardware store for free are made with remarkably accurate colors. Although there are many like it, I found this nice video[1] about how to DIY a color checker. He lists the names of the colors in the description. But at least he confirms that even a near match works well!
However, I found that the paint companies change their colors slightly pretty frequently. But the Wikipedia article on ColorChecker[2] has a listing of the exact colors in the ColorChecker. So you can use a site like Match My Paint Color[3] to find the nearest paint color to put together a list of color names that you can then go scoop up at your local hardware store!
>the Wikipedia article on ColorChecker[2] has a listing of the exact colors in the ColorChecker
That's only exact under CIE Illuminant C lighting, which approximates overcast outdoor lighting. Most indoor lighting has a lower color temperature than this, and in the case of LED/fluorescent lighting, a more uneven spectrum. To accurately duplicate the colors of a ColorChecker under all lighting conditions, you need the full color spectrum of each panel. Wikipedia links to a web site with this data:
I worked in camera department on a low budget feature and one of my contributions was using a ColorChecker. The DP was concerned it would take too much time, and the director echoed those concerns. We compromised by only using the chart on the first take of each new setup. Nobody complained about how long it took to slate/chart once we got into production. I did get a message of appreciation from the director once they went to post. The editor/colorist sung the praise of having that data available.
The ColorChecker is one of those things that once you know its power, you'll never want to not use it again. Of course, you'll not use it for everything unless you're trying to impress. It's just one of those things that have fallen out of favor with digital. Things like light meters, chip charts, etc are just things younger people never working in film seem to not learn about any more
I didn't learn much from reading this article. Questions linger in my mind, for example: What are the CIE XYZ coordinates of each colored square? What is the spectral distribution of each square? How were the colors chosen?
> What are the CIE XYZ coordinates of each colored square?
In the most expensive versions, they measure each individual patch, in case printing imperfections make the colours slightly different. And of course because you can’t get the exact same inks when a product is 50 years old!
> How were the colors chosen?
Skin and foliage; primary colours; greyscale; and miscellaneous.
They also make a 140 colour patch version - the “ColorChecker Digital SG” - that provides more coverage; 14 different skin tones instead of 2 for example!
Not the exact same inks, for sure, but as a slight tangent—having grown up with RGB/YUV/CIE coordinates and Pantone swatches and process-color printing, but without painterly training, I’d long imagined the world of physical color reproduction to be largely continuous over the perceptible gamut.
In the spirit of the classic “Reality Has a Surprising Amount of Detail,” [0] I realized relatively late in life how finite and how discrete the set of colored substances—pigments, dyes, inks, reflective nanostructures—is. That, for example, ultramarine means ~the same thing today as it did in the lapis mines centuries ago, and so on. Frustrated, of course, by things like impurities and degradation at the hands of time and light and medium… but nevertheless finite sets of color-reflecting substances and applications at the bottom.
In my case, it was the Forbes Pigment Collection that got me started thinking about it:
And the strange notion of “new” colors, like YInMn Blue [1], and formulations, like Klein Blue [2] (to dwell just on ultramarine-style blues!)
…I still don’t have a firm enough handle on color in all its glorious complexity to have a real point: you’re right of course that even within tightly-controlled production processes anchored in chemical reality, things drift and it’s worth paying somebody to measure if it’s important to be right—I just thought I’d offer the notion as a Sunday morning treat, in the hope that somebody else found the rabbit hole as delightful as I did :)
Pleasantly surprised to see dpreview still running, I thought they had shut down. It was a fantastic site back in the day. Not sure how it fares these days.
> The orange and Yellow patches visually matched some samples of oranges and lemons, both freshly picked, not dyed.
> Some blue flowers, most notably the morning glory of the variety "Heavenly Blue," are prized for their blue color, but frustrate the attempts of photographers to depict them.
…speaking as a longtime cultivator of morning glories—I’m gazing at a “Heavenly Blue” variety in bloom as I write [0]—they are absolutely correct; and I love that this fact informs the norms of the entire photographic industry!
And, of course, the bottom line:
> Having developed a well-characterized test object, we feel obligated to point out that color-reproduction systems hardly ever reproduce all colors exactly. The practical limitations of such processes make perfect color reproduction virtually impossible.
Nostalgia! I don't remember them coming out, but I was involved in setting up Calibrite. I was more involved in the monitor calibrators (my team developed the new software) and the infrastructure.
As it turns out, paint samples that you can get at the hardware store for free are made with remarkably accurate colors. Although there are many like it, I found this nice video[1] about how to DIY a color checker. He lists the names of the colors in the description. But at least he confirms that even a near match works well!
However, I found that the paint companies change their colors slightly pretty frequently. But the Wikipedia article on ColorChecker[2] has a listing of the exact colors in the ColorChecker. So you can use a site like Match My Paint Color[3] to find the nearest paint color to put together a list of color names that you can then go scoop up at your local hardware store!
1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pusFS7JmKQM 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ColorChecker 3. https://www.matchmypaintcolor.com/
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