Datacolor Spyder Checkr Photo verdict
Summary
The Spyder Checkr Photo is really only useful for Lightroom Classic, Adobe Camera Raw and Hasselblad Phocus software users, but it does provide useful and precise color corrections within those programs. It works outside of a regular color management workflow, but this helps make it easy to understand and use.
For
+ Precise color adjustments
+ Straightforward to use
+ Not expensive
+ Also works as gray card for white balance and exposure
Against
– Third party tools needed for other software
– Changes can be hard to spot
– The process is simpler than the instructions!
Color management is a pretty dry and technical process that’s necessary for a lot of photographers, print bureaux and publishers, but it’s a world of color gamuts, ICC profiles, rendering intents and hardware calibration that many creatives avoid – they just ‘wing it’ instead and manage perfectly well.
The good news is that the Spyder Checkr Photo is a simple tool that sidesteps this highly technical process to offer a quick and dirty color correction tool that most photographers will ‘get’ straight away and is nonetheless precise and effective.
It consists of a precisely manufactured set of color swatches in a fold-out plastic ‘book’. You photograph the swatches, make some basic adjustments in Lightroom Classic (the workflow I tried) to crop into the target and adjust white balance and exposure for good quality readings, and then use the supplied SpyderCheckr utility to compare what the camera captured against the known swatch color values.
The utility will then generate and export a correction preset which shifts the colors the camera captured into those it should have reproduced. In Lightroom, this is a set of Hue, Saturation, Lightness tweaks in a preset.
It works very well. It’s a bit annoying that you have to restart Lightroom after creating the preset in order for it to become available, but that’s Lightroom’s fault.
You will also have to reshoot the target and create new presets for each set of lighting conditions you want to shoot in, so it’s possible you may want to reserve this tool for color critical commercial work rather than everyday shooting.
One nice touch is that there’s a second fold-out section containing 18% and 50% gray panels for while balance and exposure calibration. You can place this swatch in the scene to set a custom white balance or use your software’s eyedropper to select it later.
The Datacolor Spyder Checkr Photo doesn’t cost much, and even if you don’t use the color swatch calibration, you still get a gray card for white balance and incident light measurement.
I found the effects subtle and not always needed, but I was impressed that it fixed a tendency for my Lumix G9 to render greens a little dark and yellows a little reddish.
You might also want to check out my longer Spyder Checkr Photo review on Digital Camera World.