How to create a good colour reference

This article was translated from Dutch with the help of AI. Read the original.

If you shoot in raw, you don't really need to worry about colour temperature or colour casts. A raw file doesn't have any colours yet. Only the three separate colour channels, red, green and blue, which the image sensor captures, are stored.

The colour channels have not yet been mixed together. This means you can easily determine the correct ratio between them yourself in an image-editing programme, so you get precisely the right colours.

You can also remove any colour cast without loss of quality. If you shoot in jpg, that's a different story. So you can always bring out precisely the right colours, as long as you work in raw.

Of course, you do need to know what those colours looked like in real life. You can't just rely on your feelings and/or choose the colours that appeal to you. When colour accuracy matters, that is no longer enough. You can no longer rely on your memory. It has to be exactly right.

For example, if you need to photograph clothes for a webshop, a red shirt must not suddenly turn out to be pink when a customer unpacks it. Sometimes even the smallest differences in colour tone can be unacceptable.

But how do you restore the exact colours in post-processing? That only works if you have a reference. Something in the photo that you are 100% certain was white, black, red, blue or yellow. You can take a test photo that also includes a colour chart.

The XRite ColorChecker Passport is one such colour chart. It is a card with all kinds of coloured patches on it, whose exact real-life colours are known. This means you can easily restore them in post-processing, manually, automatically or using correction profiles.

For the average photographer, a colour reference card may be a bit much. It also works perfectly well to simply include a grey card, or even better, a white balance card in your test photo.

In post-processing, click it with the eyedropper of the 'white balance' tool in, for example, Lightroom or Photoshop to determine the best colour correction.

Want to learn more about Photoshop image editing?

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