24ColorCard-3x5 (OneSnapColor) with White Balance and User Guidebook

The quality of this is excellent. It has very accurate color boxes for color representation. This isn't the first product to do this kind of thing, but for the price this is definitely the best deal. It is not glossy, so it won't reflect light in the wrong way. It has the unique RGB values printed under each color box, so that helps with color calibration in Adobe Photoshop. The manual tells you how to use Photoshop with this product. It has a nice manual that comes with the product that additionally covers how to use the product in Adobe Lightroom and Google Picasa for novices. But, you really want to use Adobe Photoshop for this kind of product. In case anyone is not aware, these color calibration cards are principally designed for image processing with JPG files, not RAW files. As long as that caveat is known, I don't see any reason why anybody would purchase any other color calibration card. X-Rite makes a terrific product as well. The X-Rite Passport (which is the most comparable product) can do a couple of extra things that this can't (skin tone and landscape white balance gradients.) This product has one thing that the X-Rite Passport doesn't (actual RGB values that are individually tested and printed for each unique card.) This product accomplishes what is necessary and it's substantially less expensive than the X-Rite Passport. So I give this a strong buy recommendation.

For those of us merrily clicking away on our point-and-shoot cameras, what could be better than the ever increasing megapixel resolution of these electronic marvels? Most of us are quite happy with the photos taken with our cameras set on automatic. However there's more that can be done in post processing your images using a photo editor program. Sure, you can play around with the software settings until the image looks right, but how do you know that it's accurate? First of all, there are many different light sources, from natural sunlight, to indoor incandescent and fluorescent lights, all with different color "temperatures" that will shift the hue of your photos. Again, most cameras can compensate for this lighting automatically, especially if you specifically tell it which light source you are using- but it can be fooled. For instance, there may be a large colored object nearby that changes the lighting thus affecting the color temperature. That's were the camera reference card comes in. Before taking your first picture, use your camera's manual white balance control to sample the image of the CameraTrax's large greyscale rectangle in the same light that you will be shooting your photos in. This accurately sets the camera so that all the red/green/blue (RGB) pixels in your photos track each other and the grays turn out to be true grays without colorization. Once this is done, snap a photo of the bottom half of the card with all the color squares, again in the same lighting conditions. This image will be used later in your photo editor to color correct your photos. The product: The CameraTrax 24ColorCard 3x5 comes in a 9" x 6" tear-proof envelope packed in a packing pouch and tucked in a 30+ page user's guide. I received my card in perfect condition. The card itself is quality constructed with hard plastic backing both of the camera reference surfaces, and enclosed in a tough backing material that also acts as the product's hinge. Embedded within the plastic are magnets that keep the card solidly closed when not in use to protect the interior images. I had to grasp the edges quite firmly to get it open, but once opened it stayed open. The user's guide is quite detailed, with some light theory on color correction and white balancing, and instructions on how to use with four popular image editing programs. My image editor was not listed among them (Pixelmator for the iMac). I found that adjusting the white balance on my camera (an older Canon SD400 PowerShot) was very easy. Just set the camera in manual mode, select manual white balance, and then press the Menu button while focusing on the large grey rectangle on the CameraTrax card. I then took a picture of the reference color squares. My source light for this test was a fluorescent desk lamp, quite harsh, but I wanted to see what would happen. I also took a picture of the color squares with the camera set in automatic mode for comparison. Importing the two photos into my iMac and opening with Pixelmator, I looked at the image colors using the eyedropper tool set to an 11x11 square averaging. All the grayscale patches had RGB values within 2 units of each other- excellent! By comparison, the non-white balanced image RGB values were off by as much as 25 units (but visually didn't look that bad to my eyes.) Now, onto the color correction. As mentioned, my photo editor wasn't covered in the CameraTrax manual, so I had to experiment a bit. All the color samples on the card have their RGB values printed below them which makes it super easy to compare to what I got with my eyedropper tool. What I found was my color values were way off in scale, both overall and in relation to each other. So much for trusting my own eyes! I played around with Pixelmator's color channel and other color correction controls and got the values closer, but I see it can take some time to get the values to fall in line and I'll have to play with this some more. It could be that performing the color corrections with one of the four programs supported in the user's guide would be easier, but I have no interest in other photo editor programs outside of Pixelmator. Ideally there should be some mechanism where this task can be performed automatically, but I'm not aware if anyone has a solution to this. Overall this is a high quality reference card that showed me the error of my (photo taking) ways and hopefully I'll repent and start taking better notice of color correcting my important images, however I'll still be taking most of my photo's in automatic mode since it is very quick.

Really good budget friendly card! The card itself is great, nice size, heavy duty, well designed. The software integration is a little different. Essentially for lightroom you take a picture of it and set your point, then apply that setting to all your photos. My results were pretty good, but I would have liked better software integration like you get with some other cards. Overall for the price it's hard to beat! I would recommend it as a great card for anyone looking for accurate color.

Disappointed in the quality. It looks like it was printed of just any old computer and glued down. I get what I paid for with the price and it works ok, but i honestly don't feel like I can quite trust the colors to be true. As I am using this for painting reproduction photos this is very important to me and will be looking for a different product.

The product works for me. I like the size. When you receive it you'll see it's more of less a high-quality color-corrected (inkjet?) print-out stuck on a folding card. Slightly expensive for what it is, but much less expensive than the "official" color/white balance cards. Used it to correct a very large number of pictures shot in my home "studio". Happy with the end results. Saved me a lot of time.

The RGB values and what is actually printed are way off!!! Only the white balance portion is half decent and even that. Stay away from this product.

Just outstanding! This card is well made, non-reflective, and the pocket design is really handy for regular use inside or outside. I use mine with my Sony RX10ii camera and find the camera calibrates very quickly using this card, more brightness adjustments than color are needed. I find the card very nice to ensure color confirmation after I take my photos more than in setup. Yeah...yeah...I know this is backwards but I don't need to make that many adjustments, the camera is surprisingly good at color accuracy. This is a huge advantage since I can then use the white to black squares most often for brightness adjustment in post production via Photoshop and then the colors seem to snap into place, very close really. I will buy another one for portable use.