If you’ve ever held a small card of 24 colored squares up to your subject, you’ve used a piece of imaging history that just hit a milestone birthday. The ColorChecker (also called the Macbeth chart if you’ve been around a while) is turning 50, and Calibrite has marked the occasion with a virtual museum for the little chart that helps photographers keep colors accurate. 

The anniversary hub for the occasion includes a timeline from the founding of the Macbeth Artificial Daylight Company to today, along with fun facts about the card and some of its famous uses. It also breaks down the purpose behind each of the 24 patches and features a quiz to test your knowledge of each color. 

The small chart debuted in a 1976 paper, “A Color-Rendition Chart,” by C.S. McCamy, H. Marcus and J.G. Davidson, written while Macbeth was a division of Kollmorgen. The idea was simple but clever: each patch was locked to a spectral reflectance value instead of a printed ink mix, so the card could be measured, reproduced and trusted across different materials and lighting conditions. 

Calibrite

When photography went digital, the ColorChecker came along for the ride. Shoot a Raw file with one in the frame, then feed it into Adobe Lightroom or DxO PhotoLab, and you get a custom camera profile that pulls your colors closer to how the scene actually looked. The ColorChecker Digital SG, though, saw an expansion of color, jumping to 140 squares that include the original 24 colors, a 17-step grayscale for fine tonal control, and 14 dedicated skin-tone patches.

The card has changed hands a few times: Gretag, GretagMacbeth and X-Rite all owned it before Calibrite took over. It’s also changed in size. The original measured roughly 13 by 9 inches, with proportions that closely match a 35mm film frame, and it now comes in a range of sizes, including one barely bigger than a postage stamp for macro subjects. But the patch layout and spectral targets have stayed consistent enough that profiles built around the standard remain interchangeable. Fifty years on, and photographers still reach for this tool for the same reason they always did.

DxO has announced PhotoLab 10, the latest version of its subscription-free Raw editor. The new iteration of the app offers more advanced masking tools, a new color grading wheel, automatic sensor dust removal and direct connectivity to Affinity, all under the company’s perpetual license. 

Most of the updates revolve around masking changes. That includes the addition of Depth Masks, which it previously released as part of Nik Collection 9 earlier this year. DxO says the feature uses AI to build a detailed depth map from any Raw file, based on distance from the camera, even without embedded depth data. It allows photographers to independently target the foreground, midground or background for more precise editing. 

DxO

DxO is also expanding some of PhotoLab’s existing AI-based masking tools. The company says that the AI Masks tool can now identify every person in a scene and allows photographers to create a single mask for all people, combine only selected people into one mask or create individual masks for every person. For even more control, the tool even allows photographers to select individual features of people, such as eyes, hair and lips. 

Users can now also select individual features such as eyebrows, eyes (as a whole or breaking out the iris, pupil and whites), teeth, facial hair, face skin and lips from the list of selectable AI Mask categories. It should offer even more fine-tuned control while retouching portraits. The masking updates also include an expanded U Point toolkit, DxO’s approach to creating local adjustments based on the color and luminosity of a sampled point. Users now have access to a brush-based Control Brush and elliptical Control Points alongside the existing circular ones. 

DxO

PhotoLab 10 adds more than masking changes. DxO has brought over the color grading wheel introduced with Nik Collection 9, which puts shadows, midtones, highlights and global color on a single wheel. It’s tone-based grading, distinct from the hue-targeted color wheel that remains in the app. It also added an AI-powered sensor dust removal tool that automatically removes sensor spots on Raw files. Lastly, there is now a new export option for Affinity, Canva’s now-free professional image editing software, so photographers can send images directly to that platform for additional editing. 

PhotoLab 10 is available starting today for macOS and Windows. A new license costs $250, while upgrades from PhotoLab 8 or 9 are $130. A 30-day free trial is available on DxO’s site.

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