A view of the basICCaliCube
After only a couple of months of use, I can say that this little tool has simplified the whole process of evaluating shadow and highlight areas in an image, especially when shooting raw and especially when photographing scenes that have no proper highlight area or full tonal range. For example, a landscape which consists mainly of midtones will be hard to evaluate when establishing highlight and shadow points.
Placing the Cube in a shot gives all the information needed to properly set white and black points for a given lighting set-up, whether artificial or natural. The grey face of the Cube is for setting a mid-tone and is particularly useful as it is spectrally neutral... which means it won't change colour under different lighting conditions unlike some popular grey cards. Imagine shooting a bunch of garments somewhere outside...the weather is variable; some cloud cover, some sun... you do a reference shot each time the light changes with a (non-spectrally neutral) grey card. When you come to process the raw files, you use each reference shot to neutralise on and find that... oh dear... each batch of images has a slightly different colour temp. If you use a spectrally neutral grey card instead though... consistency reigns. Which means time saved... and time is...
The only thing you need in addition is something to hang the cube off!
Nick Dunmur 2006