Photography

Colour profiling my ZenFone 5 with the ColorChecker

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I’ve really liked my new ASUS ZenFone 5 since I initially took it out of the box. It’s got some nice improvements over the ZenFone 4, particularly when it comes to the cameras.

They’re a little sharper, with a tad more dynamic range, and they really do show off the scene well when I use it to get photos when location scouting.

But I like to shoot DNG RAW with my phones so that I can process them on the desktop rather than on the phone itself. This way, I can quickly batch process them and schedule them on social media using Hootsuite.

DNG colour from smartphones isn’t perfect, though, which is where the X-Rite ColorChecker Passport steps in. It solves all my DNG colour issues and makes the post work a breeze.

The whole process is detailed in the above video, so I’m not going to go too much into it here in this post. But here’s the basic outline…

  1. Shoot a RAW photo of the ColorChecker Passport
  2. Run it through the X-Rite software or Lightroom plugin
  3. Reload Lightroom or Bridge/ACR

It’s really that simple.

If you don’t own a ColorChecker Passport, you can buy one here if you’re in the USA or here in the UK. And if you don’t want to buy one just to profile your ZenFone 4 or ZenFone 5, then here are all the profiles for both cameras for you to download, install and use with your own phone’s DNG RAW files.

To install them on Windows, simply copy them to the following folder in your user directory.

\AppData\Roaming\Adobe\CameraRaw\CameraProfiles

For the Mac, I believe it is here, but as I don’t use a Mac, I am unable to confirm. If you think it’s wrong, let me know in the comments below and I’ll fix it.

User Library > Application Support > Adobe > CameraRaw > CameraProfiles

It appears that Skylum Luminar 2018 also just added support for DNG Camera Profiles recently.

So, expect another video in the near future, covering a different colour profiling workflow using the X-Rite standalone application for the ColorChecker and Luminar 2018.