The ColorChecker – a small card featuring 24 color patches – has turned 50. And, to mark its half century, Calibrite, the manufacturer, has launched a virtual museum exploring the history of the iconic design.
Calibrite has said that the virtual museum forms part of a year-long celebration of its color-accuracy tool. These will also include a challenge teaching what each of the 24 color patches does and a “perfectionist” quiz matching creators to the right Calibrite products.
The original ColorChecker, later known as the “Macbeth chart,” was created by scientists at the Macbeth company, who designed it for the TV and movie industry.
To determine the correct paint colors, they used a spectrophotometer to measure the actual spectral reflectance curves – how much light is reflected at every individual nanometer wavelength of the visible spectrum – of real-world materials like human skin and leaves.
Over the next 50 years, the ColorChecker brand changed corporate hands several times, from the newly merged GretagMacbeth company in the late 1990s, to X-Rite in the mid-2000s, and finally to the current owner, Calibrite, in 2021.
As the owners of the ColorChecker changed, so did the technology behind it. These days, ultra-precise laser scanners measure the light of each color patch, translating them into universal digital coordinates that computers and software can understand.
This enables the digital ColorChecker products to determine correct screen colors beyond the original handheld card. In fact, here at Digital Camera World, we use a ColorChecker Video when editing our Bokeh Face podcastt to ensure we don’t get any quirky hues before publishing an episode.
Calibrite’s 50th anniversary of the ColorChecker went live today, September 1, and you can check out the virtual museum and other celebratory online activities at the official hub.
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