abc1234 wrote:
Gene, I have checked out the product several times on the website and while it appears to be a good product, I do not think it is better than Expodisc. Here are a few reservations and feel free to correct me on them.
It is fine so long as you have a subject standing in the shoot's lighting and is holding the Checker. What do you do for landscapes, street shoots, night scenes or sports?
Once you have your reference shot, you have to set all the other session shots to it in LR. With Expodisc, calibrate and shoot away. Both products are good as long as the lighting does not change. Both manufacturers mention this.
Talking about changing lighting, you create Checker profiles for your various bodies and apply them so long as the lighting does not change. How can you tell if the color temperature changes 250 degrees, enough to throw off your calibration without your eye noticing? To check this, you need a color temperature meter or recalibrate Checker.
All things considered, I will stick to my Expodisc and avoid any of the cheap imitations.
Gene, I have checked out the product several times... (
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It doesn't sound like you've actually used one.
I've used white cards, gray cards (Kodak 18%), Expodisk and Color Checker Passport, and I also used Spectracolor and Minolta color meters. All do the same thing - measure the color of the light falling on the subject. The color meters are out for me, because they proved finicky and unreliable, constantly requiring recalibration.
The gray and white cards change over time, and are not great with non-continuous spectrum lighting. Try shooting at night under a streetlamp.
I used the Expodisk for about a year, and was generally satisfied with it. But, I could not use it with my long lenses (300, 400, and 600mm lenses).
So I searched for a solution and found the CCP. The beauty of this approach is that you shoot raw and apply the profile later, in post, but it has a series of warming and cooling targets to make small adjustments.
Why I prefer it to the expodisk? With an expodisk you have to walk over to your subject's position, place it on the lens, point it at the light and create a custom white balance setting. That is a big pain in the tail when you have changing light, or settings that have mixed lighting in different levels. Much easier to not bother with creating multiple custom white balance settings and constantly changing them. I have shot in venues that had window light, stage light, and room light - all different colors and depending where you stood in the room the mix changed. Very challenging to do with CWB in camera. Way easier to manage with several profiles that are applied in post.
As far as shooting the target vs shooting the light to create a CWB - both are a pain. But you save lots of time by simply shooting a target, than having to stop what you are doing, install the expodisk, walk over to the subject, and point and create a CWB -
Night scenes - no contest - shoot the target, take your shots, apply profile, make creative adjustments, done.
Sports - hard to do with both - you either have to put the target in the same light as the subject, or you have to walk to the field and shoot the light with the expodisk. Same difference.
Changing light - already covered above. CCP way more convenient than making CWB for each condition.
Landscapes - its a draw - both work equally well. I still like the convenience of just shooting a target and not having to fiddle with camera wb settings.
I do find that color casts are better addressed with the CCP. the green-magenta spectrum sometimes is not accurately captured and corrected for with the expodisk. And I don't need to pick the standard or "warm-complimentary to skin tone version - the CCP covers that in their calibration target.
Only downside, if you can call it that - is that the color patches do drift in color value over time. So you have to periodically replace it - it does have an expiration date. I didn't have my expodisk long enough to see if the color drifted on it.
Anyway, my experience is that I get more accuracy, with less bother with the CCP than I did with the expodisk. I shoot raw exclusively. if I were shooting jpg, I would likely use the expodisk.