ColorChecker

The ColorChecker was introduced in a 1976 paper by McCamy, Marcus, and Davidson in the Journal of Applied Photographic Engineering.

[5] It includes 24 patches in a 4 × 6 grid, each slightly under 2 inches (5.1 cm) square, made of matte paint applied to smooth paper, and surrounded by a black border.

Six of the patches form a uniform gray lightness scale, and another six are primary colors typical of chemical photographic processes – red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, and yellow.

The pigments for ColorCheckerPassport were modified in November 2014, so the current available cards do not have exactly the same carnation, and hence RGB numbers, as before, and particularly are not the ones provided on next section.

[6] Color targets such as the ColorChecker can be captured by cameras and other color input devices, and the resulting images’ output can be compared to the original chart, or to reference measurements, to test the degree to which image acquisition reproduction systems and processes approximate the human visual systems.

ColorChecker held in a photographic portrait setting
X-Rite ColorChecker Passport Photo 2
Nominal chromaticities of ColorChecker patches in the CIE 1931 xy chromaticity diagram (in the SVG version , hover over a color swatch to highlight it; click it to select and deselect it)
PDF version of the chart