How-To: Easy X-rite ColorChecker Passport Profile Generation in Lightroom 3

My earlier post contained a link to a video from X-rite that goes into detail about how to use the X-rite ColorChecker Passport in Lightroom and ACR (Adobe Camera Raw).

This is just the quick steps to generate a profile in Lightroom 3

  1. In Lightroom, select a picture you took with your camera of the ColorChecker Passport
  2. Right click on the picture and select Export > ColorChecker Passport
  3. Give it a name that will mean something to you later,
    I use: (camera model) – (conditions) – (Photos WB settings)
  4. Wait… and done.
  5. Restart Lightroom and it will show up in Develop > Camera Calibration > Profile

My Back Porch

A bee with bits of pollen on its head searches for another flower

I could go on a photo safari, I could spend hours traveling someplace else. Or I could walk out on the back porch and see what is going on out there, ten feet from my cup of coffee. This bee is covered in little bits of pollen and someplace between one flower and the next doing his duty as a bee to spread a little plant love.

This was shot hand held from a few feet away at 1/400 f/2.8, iso 100. These settings result in a lot of out of focus shots as the bee moved in and out of focus and I tried to remain still.

Living with Android & Samsung Galaxy S

So I gave up the iPhone 3Gs after the poor iOS 4 experience and picked up a Sprint Epic, AKA Samsung Galaxy S (with a keyboard) on Sprint. The rest of the carriers have Galaxy S variants as well (more on that here )

One thing to note: I am pretty well Googlized at this point with contacts, calendar, rss and tasks on Google, to name a few. I did this because synchronizing the various applications (Outlook, iTunes) and whatever phone I had always seemed to threaten data consistency one way or another. Now all I have to worry about is Google being evil.

Some of the apps I have added to make things a little better or replace defaults (all free).

  • DoubleTwist: Music player that works a lot like an ipod (also has a desktop component that I am not using).
  • WiFi Analyzer: This helped me trouble shoot speed issues with my home router.
  • KeePassDroid: Is able to open a KeePass database in read only mode (if you are not using KeePass for passwords on your desktop and don’t have a solution you already love, you might want to take a look).
  • Gesture Search: Search anything on your phone using finger scribble on the whole screen.
  • Shazam: Will tell you what a song is called by listening to it and checking a large database.
  • Sound Manager: Lets you control when your phone makes sounds based on type of sound and time. This is great if you don’t care to be waken up by email but want to wake up to SMS messages or whatever.
  • Photoshop Express: This lets you edit pictures right on you phone.
  • GTasks: Allows offline use of Google Tasks with syncronization.
  • Caffeine: Keeps the screen on and unlocked while running, goes back to normal when it is not.
  • Google Reader Client: for RSS reading.
  • Nook for Android: For BN books
  • Audible: As with all Audible applications, this one is not as good as it could be but it works better than the Audible for iPhone app.
Updated: July 7th 2011
In addition to the apps above I have added:
  • Starbucks (Official): Allows you to pay with your phone and manage Starbucks cards.
  • ConvertDroid: Converts everything to everything (I’m not kidding).
  • gStrings: Guitar tuning.
  • Urbanspoon: an iPhone classic, works well on Android too.
  •  TeslaLED: Flashlight using camera flash (froyo +)
Another thing to note: I noticed on my phone that apps that were preloaded with the phone were not updating. Going out to the market and installing the market version fixed this issue. 

Step One, Stop

 


You may recognize Cow in the Pasture at Sunset as the current header shot of this site. I was heading back from Yosemite about half way between where I was and where I was going when the sun was setting and I saw this cow. I pulled over onto the soft shoulder, unpacked my gear and spent about 20 minutes getting things just right.

After reviewing this picture, I decided I did not like the stand of trees on the horizon just above the cow. In the large print version there is less contrast between it and the clouds and you can see them clearly so it works. In this downsized web presentation it is just distracting.

To fix this took seconds in Lightroom 3. Going back to the full size image, I used the Spot Removal tool (also available in ACR), I just placed a spot about twice as big as the offending portion and use an area immediately adjacent on the horizon. Then I cropped, resized and saved it as a jpeg with an sRGB color space.