Colour Balance Target

I have a pretty decent camera now, which is held back mainly by my own ignorance and incompetence. It is, in theory, highly configurable in terms of the images it spits out, but 99% of the time I rely on its automatic settings, as they generally do a good enough job for my purposes.

Wrestling with colour balance for photography under lights is something that has always been problematic. I know that its possible to get lights that are tunable — that is, the colour temperature is adjustable, so it's possible to get a reliable simulacrum of daylight from them. However, I can't afford that sort of thing, so I rely heavily on software colour adjustment and standard "cool white" LED lamps.

I put together this little colour and tone target, printed from my CMYK laser printer. It's not nearly good enough for scientific accuracy, but it gives me a repeatable reference to work from, which is an improvement over guessing.