I've been curious about this, and I found a local place that'll rent one to me for $10 (and apply it toward the purchase should I choose to get one). Anyone do an ACR calibration of their camera using a gretag macbeth color checker? Did you find it was worth doing and does it improve the color quality right out of the gate? Any pros/cons welcome

*crickets chirping*

No, because I don't want perfectly neutral images and the auto setting in ACR does me just fine for proofs. If an image needs WB fine tuning I'll do that for a print or album.

Actually, calibratiing your camera with a color checker using Thomas Fors script works pretty good. Our studio did it for a base line of each camera. Since each chip in the camera vary slightly the way it sees and capture information, this helps bring the chip back to a standard.

Keep in mind this isn't for making a netural image. You can set that in your image adjusting settings via WB and Tint.

You can use the color checker to white balance too, but like Stepen said it will make the image netural.

Would love to do it , but don't want to buy the color macbeth color checker. There's a good tutorial on how to do it correctly on lynda.com (incase you didn't already know). I switched to Capture One to process my raw files and the colors (skin tones) are way more accurate on my D200. That program has built in profiles for most cameras. It's slow though. Free trial.

Yeah, I pretty much want to make sure that the colors come through the best they can. I've seen some before/after places where reds are more vivid and what not, if I can get stuff like that put into a preset, it could mean less time messing with a file. Or not, who knows

Here's a couple of XMP files for Photoshop CS2 ACR Camera calibrations: http://www.oaktree-imaging.com/downloads/

P.S. There are also some test charts as well.

Unfortunately, I have the 30d. but yeah I've come across that page before. I've also read of some people shooting the image of the color checker from their calibrated monitor, but I can't imagine that would work that well.