Release Issued by Douglas Photographic:
Using Douglas’ Grey Card Makes for Perfect Pictures The Douglas Grey Card is now available world wide
Winchester, UK (18th December 2006) – Douglas Photographic announced today the availability world wide of that indispensable tool for a photographer’s kit, the Douglas Grey Card. Made of modern materials that are tough enough to be written on, the Douglas Grey Card’s innovative design enables it to deliver the best grey reflectance values, when compared to comparative products against the 18% ideal.
The grey card reflects the same proportion of all colours of light falling on it, including ultra-violet and the limit of visible red, providing a stable reference point for a photographer to calculate the correct exposure.
The Douglas Grey Card has a more neutral reflectance than rival products under the widest range of sources of illumination, including tungsten, daylight, flash and warm fluorescent tubes, thus enabling an even more accurate colour balance and exposure.
For further information on comparative tests see here:
www.photo-software.com/GreyCard_Compare.pdf and www.photo-software.com/pdf/GreyCard_DSheet.pdf
Grey on one side and white on the other, the Douglas Grey Card is suitable for a wide range of purposes including exposure measurement, contrast measurement, colour balancing and setting the white balance. The Douglas Grey Card folds easily to just under A5 size and fits snugly into a camera bag. Once fully opened, it is large enough to fill a 35mm camera viewfinder at 50 cm with a 50mm lens.
“Grey cards are essential in establishing the correct exposure when taking photographs or filming, particularly when shooting dark or bright subjects,”
says Douglas Green, Managing Director and founder of Douglas Photographic.
“The reason that snow often looks grey instead of white in photos is because the photographer hasn’t got an accurate measurement of the light reflected from the scene. A camera’s light meter is calibrated to assume that the subject will reflect back at approximately 18% of the light that hits them; in a bright scene like snow the grey card provides a much needed neutral reference to ensure a correct exposure.
The grey card is also an essential tool to ensure correct colour balance.
When included as part of the photo, it can be used a reference point when processing the photos in the lab or image processing software, in the case of digital. Even though most digital cameras and videos have Automatic White Balance (AWB), it can be fooled, especially if there is a particular colour dominating the scene. Using the grey card allows you to manually set the white balance so that all the images under that lighting temperature will have the correct colour balance.”
The Douglas Grey Card uses simple principles of science and new materials to provide better colour balancing of digital and conventional materials under a range of natural and artificial light conditions. Complete with an online instruction leaflet that provides additional guidance to digital photographers, the Douglas Grey Card can be written on with a Chinagraph pencil or non-permanent marker and cleaned off with mild detergent.
Pricing and availability
The Douglas Grey Card is available now from Douglas Software www.photo-software.com/greycard.htm and costs just £10.95 + postage and packaging. VAT is applicable on UK orders.
