Need Opinions On Best Use Of Xrite Passport

Keith Hollister

Well-Known Member
I have a Xrite Passport Colorchecker, and am getting motivated again to try it out on my recent Fuji acquisition. While I'm pretty happy in general with LR 5.3, some shots (primarily landscape type stuff with blue skies) are not real close to the STD color balance on the JPG's nor to what I expect to see (Fuji film emulations notwithstanding). While I can adjust my way out of it manually, it is not always trivial because the sky will need to go further in the blue axis (and usually away from green), yet certain earth tones are not warm enough (need to go towards yellow) - i.e. the WB controls don't always get it done.

My question for other Passport users is what to capture and create a profile from - AWB or Daylight? I realize that in ideal conditions, one would create a profile for every lighting and WB combo you would expect to encounter, but I'm looking for a single profile to get the color interrelationships correct - not to get perfect WB along the cool/warm axis.

My theory is that there may be some color mapping error in the Adobe profile that would be constant across all WB settings and AWB operation, so I'm inclined to try making 2 - one with AWB on the camera under clear skies midday ("daylight" conditions) and one with the camera in AWB (how I normally shoot since it does such a great job) under the same conditions.

Interestingly enough, Iridient, Photo Ninja and the Fuji Silkypix SE version that's on the CD are pretty good at getting the color balance correct (at least to my eye) but all have some other fatal flaw (at least for me). Iridient is noisy and no amount of MR fiddling in the app solves it without crushing the detail (to where its much worse than LR). PN & Silkypix have nonexistent or really poor highlight recovery and both are pretty slow and peculiar to operate.

Anybody got suggestions based on experience?

Just to get it out of the way, I am fully color managed with an Xrite i1 Display and ColorEyes Display Pro software. I have the camera generating AdobeRGB profiles and I run LR in ProPhotoRGB as the native colorspace.
 
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