James Stephens

I haven’t been entirely satisifed with the color rendition from the Canon EOS 5D I shoot with. My monitor is calibrated but just recently I took a shot of some hawthorn berries and they came out a kind of red-orange color instead of the bright intense red I was expecting.

I did a little research and came across this article on how to calibrate the color rendition in Adobe Camera RAW 3.x. The writer, Eric Chan, was unsatisified with the colors he was getting from his Canon 5D too and following calibration he noticed that the reds in particular improved greatly.

I acquired a Gretag Macbeth ColorChecker Chart and proceeded to follow the instructions in Eric’s article. Two hours later I was very pleased with the results:

Before Calibration

After Calibration

Before Calibration (Cropped)

After Calibration (Cropped)

As you can see, the berries are red now and not orange-red and I am one happy camper.

If it is of any interest, here are the values I came up with for a Canon EOS 5D. I wonder if others find similar:

Red Hue  -15
Red Sat  +26
Green Hue  -9
Green Sat  -4
Blue Hue  +4
Blue Sat  -12

Recommended Reading

This book completely changed my digital RAW workflow. Before reading it I used Adobe RAW simply as a file conversion tool to import RAW images into Adobe Photoshop CS2 where the real work could be done. Since reading it I make so much use of Adobe Camera RAW (ACR) that I often don’t have to use Photoshop at all.

The calibration steps documented on Eric’s website are discussed thoroughly in this book.