[Dartmoor Dave]

I spent £30 on a used Spyder monitor calibrator, and I recommend it wholeheartedly. It's the single most useful tool I've acquired since I switched from film to digital a couple of years ago. I now firmly believe that if you're not using a hardware calibrated monitor, you're effectively working blindfolded.

[a96agli]

Interestingly, also the head of art who runs the school photography club had never heard of calibrating the monitor :/ I'll get spyder and see what happens.

[narual]

Check with the people who do graphic design and printing (or the IT person who supports them). Monitor calibration matters greatly for printing... not so much for anything else. Print 20,000 flyers that look great on your screen but awful in print and you've just cost someone a lot of money and dropped a lot of paper into the recycle bin.

Also, if you post-process in lightroom, you can slightly desaturate the greens and move the color slider for green a touch towards blue and it will probably look more 'real' to you.

The whole discussion of calibration reminds me of my first web project, where the nice teal color the marketing department had chosen for the primary color on the website was turned into a godawful garish lime/neon green because no one there had the cajones to tell the guy in charge of operations that his monitor was screwed up and it looked fine on everyone else's... they kept tweaking the color til the piece of paper he held up to his screen matched the screen. I started a few weeks later. We had that awful color on the site for the entire 10 years I was there, even though the operation director retired about 5 years later.

[a96agli]

Here are resized but otherwise unedited versions of couple of the photos on the blog - can any of you see a difference? I might correct the contrast a bit too much as well because I'm used to a screen that shows the colours as a bit faded and not as dynamic.

Attached Images

   

[JimJohnson]

Here are resized but otherwise unedited versions of couple of the photos on the blog - can any of you see a difference? I might correct the contrast a bit too much as well because I'm used to a screen that shows the colours as a bit faded and not as dynamic.

I can see a big difference between the two. Your first one is mostly in bright sunlight and the second is in deep shade. The first thing I notice is the color temp and contrast differences. Deep shade is almost always more blue than open sunshine and has less contrast. As a result, the green in the shade is almost over-saturated.

For what it is worth, my office desk is lighted by a narrow shaded desk lamp with a 6500K daylight fluorescent bulb, with little outside light. My primary monitor is a DVI driven 22" LED backlighted LCD monitor. It has a reasonably broad, but not huge contrast ratio. It has been calibrated with a Pantone/X-rite HueyPRO Colorimeter to 6500k and a gamma of 2.2.

- - - for U.S. readers, it looks like B&H has a demo unit available for US$75 - - - that is a real bargain! - - - When I purchased my used unit, I did need to download the Windows 7 64bit version from Pantone.

[JimJohnson]

How the HueyPro works (and I assume the process is similar with other hardware based monitor calibration tools)

You Tube

You Tube

[Racer X 69]

Annoyingly, I didn't notice the dust until I had shot about 100 frames - spoiled a bunch of otherwise semi-decent images. I tried a non-static brush for the purpose, but turns out it wasn't really non-static...

The dust spots and lint can be easily cleaned up in Photoshop.

Easy Squeezy

[ChuckB28]

Yeah they look good.