1pcs 15mm*10m Adhesive Basic Decoration Masking Tape Stickers Rainbow Color Washi Tapes Set for Gift Album Diary (WHL #101)

“Tool” time today – almost an editorial note, but then the Chinese had a laugh at what I ordered.

With the (basically) fully-working Ender5++ light box, it’s easy to take photos of small to medium sized items 24/7 with consistent quality. One thing that still bothered me, though, was the auto white balance feature of GIMP. Generally works well for colorful items, but can be totally off for objects that only have colors along the white-gray-black axis with no major amount of RGB. Stuff like the white doorbell (WHL #98), the black test print cap in (#E20F3), or the shiny silvery-metal USB drive in (WHL #45) are good examples.

There are color reference cards for professional photographers that deal with the same issue, like the ColorChecker cards from X-Rite. These are generally arrays of small colored block, but I wanted a stripe that can be put to the very edge of the image that gets cut away before uploading. And I think that these, even in fake Chinese variants, are a tad too expensive to cut them up. Printing some colorful thing myself also isn’t right, since the printer will just use its CMY (and maybe a bit of K/black) to make up the colors, so it would only be a three-color card in the end.

Well, time to tap into the queer-pride-gayness madness that started out with a rainbow flag that is slowly evolving in a unrecognizable dot pattern for “but I want my own color, I’m special too!” idiots – time to order colorful tape. 1.31€ with choice delivery from AliExpress, for 15mm x 10 meters of paper-based tape with some hint of adhesive at the back that would be usless on a post-it note. I had the hope for individual color inks and no CMYK printing, which I think is the case. Both variants are made from six colors.

Funnily enough, taking a photo of the original packaging is challenging, since the Chinese applied their own humour to it. This one came (and I never have had any other of my literally hundreds of orders packaged in a similar fashion) in an iridescent ziplock bag. I’ve had black, white, clear, clear-yellow, clear-white, clear-black, clear-red, opaque bags, some made from paper, some with bubble wrap – but never one with this shiny iridescent backing. This must be special order for people who, well, order rainbow tape on AliExpress.

This thing, even with the fixed colors as a reference, totally breaks the auto white balance code of GIMP and requires a couple manual iterations to make the background neutral white and the thing in front as colorful as it is. The bag really pops!

I already put the tape to work, as I took a couple of photos for an item I’ll be auctioning off eBay. It got a white 230V power supply, which typically yields bad results with a single run of all the auto-magic functions.

Raw HDR image as downloaded from the camera:

Maximized contrast:

White balance: (Nice!)

And cut to size:

Pretty good and absolutely sufficient for the item in question.
If however I remove the strip (or cut the image above to size first, basically same results), GIMP goes from this:

to this:

Contrast goes to eleven – not absolutely terrible in this example, I have seen much worse. But there is a yellow tint along all pieces that aren’t illuminated from multiple sides, which is much more pronounced in the second image without the color reference. Same goes for locations that got additional light due to reflections, which appear unnaturally bright (also somewhat present in the other image, but didn’t occur to me until I saw the excessive version below)

Since it’s so easy to just add a strip of this tape to the corner of an image, I’ll keep on doing this, especially on white and black objects. If some professional color chart in stripe format comes along I’ll switch over, but for now, those 1.31€ will last me a long time.

Happy color balance pride!


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