Adobe Photoshop CS5 for Photographers - Martin Evening [105]
Figure 3.62 X-Rite ColorChecker charts can be bought as a mini chart or the full-size chart you see here.
2.
The next step is to launch DNG Profile Editor. Go to the File menu and choose File Open DNG Image… Now browse to locate the DNG image you just edited and click ‘Open’. The selected image appears in a separate window. Go to the Base Profile menu and select the Adobe Standard profile for whichever camera was used to capture the ColorChecker chart.
3.
Now click on the Chart tab (circled) and drag the four colored circles to the four corner swatches of the chart. If you are just measuring the one chart, select the ‘Both color tables’ option and click on the Create Color Table… button. If you are recording two separately shot targets at different white balance settings, use this menu to select the appropriate color table.
4.
The camera profile generation process is pretty much instantaneous. Once this has been done you can then go to the Edit menu and choose File Export (name of camera) Profile, or use the shortcut and rename the profile as desired.
5.
Custom camera profiles are saved to a default user folder but won't appear visible in the Camera Calibration panel profile list until you next launch Photoshop or Bridge and open a raw image via Camera Raw. Once you have done this you can select the newly created camera profile and apply it to any photos that have been shot using this camera.
6.
Here is an extra tip which is worth carrying out. You can save the camera profile selected in the Camera Calibration panel as a custom Camera Raw preset. In the example shown here I went to the Camera Raw Presets panel, clicked on the New Preset button (circled), and in the New Preset dialog shown here selected the Camera Calibration subset setting, so that only the Camera Calibration option was checked. Once I had done this I now had a camera profile preset setting that could easily be applied to any other photographs that had been shot with the same camera. One can also easily apply a setting like this via the Bridge Edit Develop settings submenu.
Spot removal tool
You can use the spot removal tool ( ) to retouch spots and blemishes. Whenever the spot removal tool is active you will see the Spot Removal options appear in the panel section on the right ( Figure 3.64 ). From here you can choose between Heal and Clone type retouching and ideally you should work on the image at a 100% magnification. In Clone mode, the tool behaves like a cross between the spot healing brush and clone stamp tool in Photoshop. It carries out a straightforward clone of the image with a soft feathered edge circle and automatically selects the area to sample from. In Heal mode, the tool behaves like a cross between the spot healing and normal healing brush in Photoshop, where a straight-forward click auto-selects an area to sample from and blends the sampled data with the surrounding data outside the spotting circle. If you then click to select a spot circle you can adjust the destination and/or source point circles. In either case, you can click to select an applied clone circle and use the Type menu to switch from one mode to the other. With both the Clone and Heal modes you have the option to adjust the radius of the spot removal tool as well as the opacity. You can use the keys to tweak the radius, but it is usually simpler to follow the instructions in Figure 3.64 and drag with the cursor instead. The Opacity slider allows you to lower the opacity setting should you wish. You can also click on the Show Overlay box or use the key to toggle showing and hiding the circles so that you can view the retouched image without seeing the retouch circles.
Figure 3.64 This screen shot shows