Windows)Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
You might find these charts available in your local area from suppliers to professional photographers or graphic arts professionals. They are also available from various sources online, including PictoColor Software's online store.
You might find these charts available in your local area from suppliers to professional photographers or graphic arts professionals. They are also available from various sources online, such as ColorMall.com.
Several sources are listed at www.hutchcolor.com.
Not necessarily. Experience has shown that many users get better results with the older ColorChecker chart. There are known problems with using the DC chart with polarizing filters. Some people dislike the glossy patches on the DC chart, claiming that they pick up unwanted reflections that skew their color values. If you use a DC chart, you may disable the glossy patches when the profile is made, to see if that improves your quality.
There are many possibilities: you have chosen the wrong chart, you have improperly exposed the chart, you have opened the chart image improperly in Photoshop, you are using the profile improperly in Photoshop. The list goes on and on. Although running the actual inCamera plug-in itself is quite simple and intuitive, there are many pitfalls relating to other factors that are outside of inCamera. We have gone to great lengths to safely steer you through this minefield in the inCamera User Guide. Do yourself a huge favor and read it cover-to-cover. You will be glad you did.
inCamera is a Photoshop plug-in that operates on images that are open in Photoshop. Photoshop can open raw image files from many digital cameras with its Camera Raw plug-in. If you do not have Camera Raw, then you must use some other program to convert your raw files into full color RGB files that Photoshop can open. The software that came with your camera should do a good job of this.
inCamera will work perfectly well with converted raw files, as long as the conversion process is always held constant (i.e. any parameters that control the conversion are fixed). Make note of the settings that you use to convert the chart image that you use to make a profile, and be sure to use the same settings to convert subsequent images that the profile will be used on.
The following guidelines may help you set some of the possible conversion parameters. If you configure your converter to output linear settings (i.e. the RGB values are linear with respect to intensity, or gamma = 1.0), then make sure you output a high-bit image (16-bits per channel). If you configure your converter to produce non-linear settings (e.g. gamma = 2.2), then an 8-bit per channel image is probably ok. Make sure the output RGB image does not "hit the wall" in any of the color channels. In other words, you should not have many pixels whose R, G or B values are either 0 or 255. If you have a problem with this, you may be able to specify a different destination profile. For example, sRGB is a smaller working space than Adobe RGB, and so the opportunity for clipping is greater. Adobe RGB (1998) is usually a good choice, since it is larger than sRGB, but not gigantic.
inCamera Professional is a legacy product that is no longer available. It has been replaced by the inCamera plug-in for profile creation and the iCorrect EditLab Pro plug-in for profile editing.