Datacolor Winners workshop – Colour Management with Gary Hill.

There was also a surprise in store when Gary’s audience was told that he always works with a light meter, to ensure ultimate exposure accuracy, even when working with cameras that have highly rated light meters built in. “It’s so important to have your exposure spot on if you want to get accurate colour,” he tells us, “and this is the way I’ve always done things, and it works brilliantly for me, so I stick with it.” Later on in the presentation he shows how over- and under-exposure can dramatically affect the colour you achieve, and it’s an eye-catching demonstration that should ensure a few more pros pick up a light meter again.

Gary also walked us through the basics, pointing out how the colours of the things around you – ranging from the walls of the studio, even down to the brightness of the top you might be wearing – can impact on the colour of the scene in front of you. This is where a simple, yet effective, tool such as the Spyder Checkr Photo totally comes into its own, and Gary most regularly shoots a test shot of the grey card surface, rather than the colour charts, since this gives him a one hundred per cent accurate average reading.

“Because I’m shooting in RAW I don’t personally change my white balance in camera,” he says. “However, if I were shooting JPEGs, then I would look to fill my frame as much as I could with the grey card, and then use that to set a custom white balance so that I knew at the shooting stage my colour was going to be accurate.”

Gary shared his screen to show us his test shot of a ram’s head with the grey card in position, and then it was a matter of moments for the Spyder Checkr Photo software’s white balance eye-dropper tool to click into action, to read the neutral tones of the grey card and to generate an HSL preset that then works in combination with your preferred image editing package to deliver a perfect rendering of colour.