Most Neutral Gray Cards for Digital Photography

Do you think you have to pay a lot of money to get a good neutral gray reference? If so, read on. The best solution may be free, and it may come from a hardware store.

I am colorblind, and I am a professional photographer. That creates problems. It means that I need to have color references I can trust, because, if I do, I can use them to create images with pleasing, vivid and accurate colors. If my references are off, then my images will probably be too.

I wanted to know which of my available gray-card references was most accurate, so I decided to measure them using a Gretag Macbeth i1 Spectrophotometer that I have. The i1 isn't the world's most accurate Spectrophotometer, but it's better than what most photographers would have available. If someone wants to improve on this by providing better measurements with a higher-end tool, I'd love to hear about it.

The candidates and the i1 Spectrophotometer are shown in the image below. I used the i1 to measure the "color" of all of the choices, then summarized how much they deviated from a neutral gray in the table that follows. The gray references are the Lastolite Ezybalance (largest behind the others), the WhiBal White Balance Reference (smallest with the black and white areas), DGC-100 Digital Gray Card (medium sized -- all gray) and a Glidden Paint sample strip (Snowfield, Universal Grey, Veil, Granite Grey, Obsidian Glass, Dark Secret) from Home Depot.

The measurements surprised me. I would have thought that the photo-products would have outscored the paint sample, but that's not the case. The Glidden strip is more neutral in every case except for the extremes where "Snowfield" (the lightest color) and "Dark Secret" (the darkest color) are slightly less neutral than the DGC-100.
So, what's a photographer to do. Well, if you've got something that's working, stick with it. My measurements are the average of three measurements on a single product, and there may well be enough product variation that you've got "a good one." If you're looking to buy something new, you might just settle for the right Glidden paint strip in these tough economic times. I have to admit, I like the form factor of the Lastolite the best, but I've been using it less and less since I did these measurements.

NVIDIA Project Inspire 2008 at Overfelt High School in San Jose

Photo by Chris Pedersen

On Saturday, I had the privilege of doing the photography for NVIDIA's annual winter community service event -- Project Inspire 2008. I was fortunate enough to secure the help of two other talented photographers -- Doug Quist, and Spencer Huang.

Photo by Spencer Huang

As in years past, I was impressed by the generosity and hard-working attitude of the NVIDIA employees. For one very long Saturday during their holiday season, they painted, shoveled, scraped, assembled, raked, hammered, grappled, prodded, poked, and sweated in the cold December air -- all so the students of San Jose's Overfelt High School students would have a better environment for learning when they were done. This year, they worked side-by-side with many student volunteers that were also impressive because of their willingness to work hard to improve their school. Many of the students also participated in a cultural show to entertain the NVIDIA volunteers. In all, more than 1,000 volunteers participated in this years event -- a nice reminder that in spite of all the bad news in the world, the amount of good still outweighs the bad by a huge margin.

Photo by Doug Quist

I've included some images here, but if you're interested in seeing more, they can be found at these links:
Top 50 Gallery
Photographer Selects 500 Gallery
All Photos Gallery -- 2000+ images

I hope you'll agree with me that the images capture the hard-work and joy of the volunteers.

Photo by Doug Quist

Photo by Spencer Huang

Photo by Chris Pedersen