The ColorChecker Considered Mostly Harmless

This post will be about colour rendition charts, e.g., X-Rite ColorChecker Classic, their usage and its dangers. It was a long time coming and some discussions accelerated the authoring. If you are in a hurry and do not want to read the entire post, the TLDR is as follows:

Unless you have all the relevant spectral measurements, a colour rendition chart should not be used to perform colour-correction of camera imagery but only for white balancing and relative exposure adjustments.

There is granularity in everything, and we will present, in the conclusion, some contexts when performing colour-correction is a good idea.

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