Warming and Cooling with Creative Enhancement Target

In addition to the white balance patch, the ColorChecker Passport Creative Enhancement target includes blue patches for warming portraits and red patches for cooling landscape images. Just like using lens filters with film, you can warm up portraits to make flesh tones look healthier. Or if you’re shooting outside, you can alter the white point to achieve richer blues and greens in a landscape.

Choosing a blue or red tint actually creates a new “neutral” to allow for a little more creativity. When you select a warming or cooling patch, the white balance values will be corrected to the neutral values shown in the preview window of whichever photo editing software you are using. For example, when selecting a warming patch, the actual patch is a blue tint. The software will balance that sample patch to neutral, and all other colors will shift slightly to the opposite of blue, which is yellow. Then, if you select a patch that is more blue, it will shift all of the colors to more yellow.