Monitor Calibration

[Wheatfield]

Originally Posted by drewdlephone

ColorVision Spyder 2. Made one hell of a difference on my MacBook. I can take my shots off my computer to work and get prints made, and as long as they don't touch it with the auto-corrector, it's identical to the colors on screen. Best hundred dollars you can spend, in my opinion, especially if you intend to show your work online or have prints made at a lab.

There should be (is no) no auto corrector when printing digital files. If your files are coming out of a calibrated workflow and are tagged with the correct colourspace for the lab (sRGB is generally considered the appropriate one), the lab should be able to print it with no imput from the operator, and give you back very close to what you saw on your screen.
This presumes the lab is also running a calibrated workflow.

I take files from my computer to work on a regular basis and am almost always able to print with either no corrections or very minimal corrections with our in house lab. Small corrections are inevitable because even two well calibrated systems will not be running absolutely identical.

[Bramela]

I purchased a Spyder 3 Elite yesterday, installed and calibrated this morning.
Comment : WOW: what a difference. Makes me realise that I was putting up with some fairly poor options. Worth every cent IMHO

[Frogroast]

To answer the original question - for those of us with a monitors or two to calibrate, there is no service worth paying for considering the cost of the hardware to do it ourselves. If you're making any money out of your photography, it's well worth it spending around US$60-100 depending on which model you buy and get to calibrate your monitor(s) as often as you want/need to. I paid US$70 for my Spyder2Express and use it on my laptop, and two desktop displays at two week intervals.

The only thing to consider is that the cheaper versions have certain limitations. For example, my Spyder2Express can only manage one monitor at a time, so dual display calibration is out. It also does not include color profiling for printing. For now this is fine until I feel the need to purchase the much more expensive, and more complete colorimeters.

Also - having a new monitor does NOT mean you don't need a colorimeter to calibrate your monitor. My brand new LCD display, calibrated by the good engineers at LG, is super bright/saturated out of the box, not so much after calibrating.

Now if you do your own printing, it's going to cost a lot more to get a dual purpose calibration tool, but again, if you're making money, it should be worth the investment.

[Class A]

I realise that hardware calibration is the way to go but in the absence of sufficient funds, I found these pages helpful:

Monitor calibration and gamma

Background to monitor calibration and gamma

Beware, though. If you are using a laptop LCD display, you may not be happy. Typically the gamma of laptop LCDs depends on the viewing angle and on mine I cannot get all three colour components corrected at the same time.

Here's a useful tool: QuickGamma.

[mtngal]

I have a Huey, but am not using it at the moment. I got it because the color on my HP laptop's monitor was so horrible compared to other monitors. Even with the Huey it wasn't very good - the Huey made it way too green. However, I also used to use a Sony 19" monitor and it worked well on it. I've recently switched to a new MacBook Pro, and haven't felt that the colors or darkness is off - but I haven't done all that much picture processing (I only got Photoshop last week). I probably won't do anything about the Huey until after I get another monitor (I'm planning on getting the new 24" Apple monitor when it ships).

[Das Boot]

I have a spyder2 and love it, but when I first used it on my monitor - it wouldn't calibrate correctly. It turned out that the monitor was awful. I grabbed a cheap/newer monitor in the closet and it worked. The colors are warmer, etc. The one precaution I would mention - even though you have a calibrated setup, you want to make sure you use a quality lab and possibly one that has an ICC profile. There's a drug store down the road from me that will print 2 8x10's or 3 5x7's for a $1 but it auto corrects and pretty much negates all the work I did. I still use them for certain situations.

-Brian

[kerrowdown]

I bet the three folk, who said "wots calibration" wont raise their hands in class.

[Bramela]

Purchased a Spyder3 recently and have no regrets. It works great and has righted a lot of difficulties I was experiencing with my monitor.
Was ready to chuck the monitor, but now, no problem.
Highly recommend Spyder 3.

[jeremy_c]

I tried using different free calibration techniques and no matter how hard I tried, I was never able to get my dual monitor system to agree with each other. I got the photo to look nice on both monitors but drag it from one monitor to the other and you could see a rather big difference :-/

So, today I broke down and bought a Huey Pro. The Before/After toggle did not change things much, but wow! Now I can drag an image from one monitor to the other and cannot see any difference what so ever. One monitor is a Samsung 225bw, the other is a HP w1907 and it made those two match perfectly. So, I am a happy camper.

Jeremy

[christinelandon]

I've been using a Colorvision Spyder2 Pro on my LCD and CRT monitors and the companion PrintFix Pro spectrometer to calibrate/make new media profiles for my Epson printers. Been doing this for a couple of years now, and really appreciate the consistency it has brought to my color prints.