Anyone doing printing is familiar with the use of printer and paper profiles, and of course we all have profiled our monitors – right?

But less known and understood is that our raw converters also use camera profiles. Depending on the program these may be visible, or hidden, but they're there. Capture One has profiles available for all of the cameras that it supports, and even has versions for different lighting conditions. Adobe has them in Camera Raw and Lightroom. It used to be that they were "hidden" in Adobe's products, but since the summer of 2008 with Lightroom 2.0 and Camera Raw 4.5 they are available, and the company even has a profile editor that allows for the customization of these so-called DNG profiles.

But now xrite has produced a simple and relatively inexpensive product ($99), the xrite ColorChecker Passport, that allows one to create ones own camera profiles, quickly and with little muss or fuss. The profiles that are created are in the form used by both Ado...