I do like my gadgets but to make the permanent cut, it has to be versatile, indispensable and preferably light weight. It also has to perform the task it was designed to do better than anything else I can afford.

When we take a photo now-a-days, the camera you have in your hand takes over a hell of a lot of the guess work we would have been faced with even a decade ago, exposure, aperture, ISO and even white balance under the present condition you’re standing in and pointing the camera at.

All modern cameras do a pretty fair to good job in tackling all these areas with the assistance of onboard processor/s, but at the end of the day you’re still relying on what the programmers of your digital camera manufacture deems as right and the quality and degree of sophistication of the sensors and glass on board your investment body.

White balance has always been a tricky subject that directly affects the finished image … but even your perception of the quality of subject matter on the rear LCD screen, if you reviewing a poorly balanced shot on the camera you may be more inclined to move on in search of better material instead of exploring what’s  in front of you. As an example, probably the most taxing of any camera system is shooting snow. I myself have been caught,… out in the snow with the camera stabbing in the dark with Auto-white balance producing sky blue snow to off yellow all in the space of 100 yards of walking.

Post processing will fix these problems to some degree you say but that means work … lots of photos, lots of work, and the fact that your perception of what you were shooting would/could have been different if you had been looking at a “per se” …closer if not finished image on the rear of the camera. This is where ColorRight can help you to the next level regardless of the DSLR camera around your neck.

Depending on your cameras make or model, it can take from between 3 to 15 seconds to set your white balance with ColorRight to a level that you expect from your investment in any conditions you find yourself in, be it indoors, outdoors, sunlight, tungsten, cloud, fluro… mind you, under ideal conditions you won’t see much if any change, but under tricky to extreme conditions is where it really shines. Simply turn off auto focus and place ColorRight Pro over the front of the lens with the red dot facing up and snap a shot. High end body’s will have a quick access function button to set white balance to the image just shot … 2 to 3 seconds tops! … For the rest of us it will mean going into the menu to set the white balance to the image just shot through ColorRight and return focus back to Auto manually …done!

Another point to keep in mind if you shoot in RAW or JPEG, and use the ColorRight product, all your workable images will be smack bang in the middle of the colour/white balance range that your saving to card, giving you the maximum workable range to work within for your post processing, Remember, RAW keeps everything, JPEG discards/deletes most, so you need to be as close to the middle as possible especially with JPEG

Next is shall I buy ColorRight or the ColorRight Pro ?  Buy what you can afford‼  for me it’s about bang for buck!  The Pro gives you 180 degrees of light gathering performance as opposed to about 70/80 degrees; it’ll get you pretty close but not as close as the Pro for a few extra pounds. The handy lanyard lets it live around my neck for quick access and is now part of my equipment dress routine studio or outdoors. The material seems to be a highly durable poly plastic, possibly from the polycarbonate family (High Impact Plastics) regardless… will give you many years of excellent service.

I even managed to get my hands on a competitors product by the name of Expodisc marketed as the Ultimate white balance filter, (77mm filter format) released pre-2004 so the principle has been around for a while. I was hard preseds to ascertain any real world difference with the ExpoDisc over the ColorRight Standard though the ColorRight Pro did seem to produce slightly better results across the boards consistently.

Conclusion

I’ve managed to put ColorRight Pro through its paces on a Sony Alfa body with various lenses and a Canon EOS 40D, thanks Brian, both body’s produced better consistent results with the ColorRight used under questionable lighting  conditions, hell I even mixed several light sources to try and confuse it but I think it’s smarter than me! Any serious studio, wedding, product or landscape photographer would be nuts not to have a serious look at this product let alone you and I. It’s been a while since a new peripheral imaging product has came along that is actually worthy of adding to anyone’s camera kit that can actually pull it’s weight, go the pro, you’ll be sorry if you don’t.

Buy ColorRight now

 Aussie Allan