Calibrating a camera for color is tricky, but the new type of color reference available makes the process much easier.
If you want your entire workflow to be color-accurate, then you need to start by creating an image, and therefore a color profile for your camera. This is probably overkill in most cases, but if you want to reproduce colors that are as close to real life as possible, then you should shoot in RAW format and use custom color profiles.
This is usually very difficult, but the new standards used to calibrate the camera make the procedure much easier. One such product is X-Rite’s ColorChecker Passport. This affordable tool contains two components: a reference calibration standard containing standardized colored squares on a plastic card and a very smart program that finds this calibration card in any image and uses known standard colors to create a profile specifically for a given camera, lens, and lighting conditions.
The program comes in two forms: as a standalone application and as a plug-in to the Adobe’s Lightroom RAW converter. In order to use the standalone program, you need to shoot RAW files in DNG format. Adobe’s DNG converter can convert your RAW files to it. The Lightroom plug-in works with all RAW files supported by Adobe Camera Raw.