Colour workflow / Screen & Printer Calibration

leinsterman

I am considering purchasing a calibration system for my computer screen and (perhaps also) my photo printer.

The Colourvision Spyder seem to be popular and gets decent reviews but ...

Which one ? ... they have a bewildering array
What alternatives are people using sucessfully ?
What have people tried unsucessfully ?
Do I need one at all or is all just bunkum spread by the same people who brought us the millenium bug to make more money for the IT community ?

elven

No experience myself but here's a friend talking about a pantone huey one: http://www.flickr.com/photos/grumpy_old_man/224310886/

Valentia

I got the Spyder2express recently (€99 in Conns at the moment I believe). At first I was confused but I calibrated my two machines here and the one at work and it does make a difference. It takes a bit of getting used to and I found that some monitors are not too hot in the brightness stakes.

For that money though I believe it is worth it. As someone said on another forum it seems silly spending so much money on gear that it is worth making sure that the stuff you produce is presented properly.

Another thing. Browsers are not colour managed, except for Safari on the Mac I'm told, so browsers will not give you a true representation of your image. The image needs to be loaded into a colourspace aware programme like PS or most good picture viewers. You have to tell those programmes what colour space your monitor is using after you calibrate though.

Stick "Colour (Color even) management into google for a vast number of tutorials.

Here is review of the Spyder2express: http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/reviews/spyder2express.html

leinsterman

Valentia wrote:

I got the Spyder2express recently (€99 in Conns at the moment I believe). At first I was confused but I calibrated my two machines here and the one at work and it does make a difference. It takes a bit of getting used to and I found that some monitors are not too hot in the brightness stakes.

For that money though I believe it is worth it. As someone said on another forum it seems silly spending so much money on gear that it is worth making sure that the stuff you produce is presented properly.

Another thing. Browsers are not colour managed, except for Safari on the Mac I'm told, so browsers will not give you a true representation of your image. The image needs to be loaded into a colourspace aware programme like PS or most good picture viewers. You have to tell those programmes what colour space your monitor is using after you calibrate though.

Stick "Colour (Color even) management into google for a vast number of tutorials.

Here is review of the Spyder2express: http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/reviews/spyder2express.html

You seemed a bit less than positive about the spyder when we spoke down in Charleville ... so you think on the balance there is merit in it ?

I have a dilemma ... my main server is also connected as a media server to my Panasonic Plasma TV ... so I need to calibrate my monitor for Photography and Plasma for home entertainment ... the spyder guys make a plasma calibration system but the price is pretty nasty and it is not clear if the calibration system serves dual purpose ... perhaps the thing to do is check their FAQ and log a support call with them ...

DaireQuinlan

Valentia wrote:

Another thing. Browsers are not colour managed, except for Safari on the Mac I'm told, so browsers will not give you a true representation of your image. The image needs to be loaded into a colourspace aware programme like PS or most good picture viewers. You have to tell those programmes what colour space your monitor is using after you calibrate though.

Or just use sRGB for everything. Most browsers (except for safari as you point out above) just assume everything is in sRGB. Plus the vast majority of places you'll send your prints to won't accept anything other than sRGB. Photobox for example, one of the reasons I went with them for printing is that if you stick an sRGB profile on your image they presume (probably incorrectly in my case !) that you know what you're doing, and won't apply any corrections to your image. I've (pretty roughly) calibrated my monitor and I've been consistently pleased with the prints I've gotten back, which is a bit subjective admittedly.

The irritating thing about it is that a properly calibrated monitor is quite dark compared to default factory settings that most seem to ship with. I've got a bunch of shots on flickr that look great edited and have given me fantastic looking prints, but look washed out and grainy on other monitors. LCDs are a big culprit here as well, completely different color characteristics. Some of this was down to the film I was scanning in (superia 1600) but thats a whole different story ...

I reckon you could spend far too much time worrying about these things

magicbastarder

DaireQuinlan wrote:

I've got a bunch of shots on flickr that look great edited and have given me fantastic looking prints, but look washed out and grainy on other monitors. LCDs are a big culprit here as well, completely different color characteristics.

same here - the shadows are boosted something awful on LCDs. washes the picture out dreadfully. i find a lot of people have extremely dark shots, which look fine on an LCD, but are badly balanced when you look at the levels.

DaireQuinlan

magicbastarder wrote:

same here - the shadows are boosted something awful on LCDs. washes the picture out dreadfully. i find a lot of people have extremely dark shots, which look fine on an LCD, but are badly balanced when you look at the levels.

Yeah thats exactly it, couldn't quite put my finger on it. The problem of course with scanning in film is that the shadows are where the grain is. Superia 1600 is particularly bad. I have a batch of shots that I took indoors under tungsten, so the blue channel is extra noisy and grainy but quite dark. The lcd screwed them up completely, boosted the shadows and to add insult to injury, added an extra little kick to the blue, so they look dreadful on LCDs, speckledy. Although on my desk in work I have three LCD monitors, 2 cheap dell ones , and one of the more expensive dell ones. that one isn't as bad. Its double annoying because everyone seems to have those cheapo dells nowadays. -sigh-

JMcL

I'm going down this road shortly as soon as funds allow. I did a fair amount of research before Christmas, and the Eye One Display seemed to be most recommended. There were quite a few negative comments about the Spyder, with some jumping ship for the EyeOne Display.

The Huey does look quite nice, it's certainly well priced. The main thing against it from reviews that I can see is that it all works a bit automagically, and the available profiles aren't very well described, meaning you're probably going to have to refer to the net to figure out which one best suits your needs for photo-processing. One off certainly, but a bit of an unnecessary nuisance nonetheless.

I'm probably going to go for the EyeOne Display LT myself. If you're looking for an online source, there're good prices on all of them here (hmm.. they've got free delivery until the end of the month as well, which is something my credit card really dodn't need to know)

mikeanywhere

Galway Camera Club recently bought one and they are calibrating the laptops at the event. Had mine done and I was lucky as the changes were next to nothing. However, another member had hers done and boy oh boy what a difference it made.

It was the Spyder 2Pro

digitalage

I have the monitor calibration that JMcL talks about and its very good, I'm based in Dublin 7 area if anyone nearby wants me to calibrate there monitor I'll do it free of charge.

Covey

Just got mine in the post this morning. Monaco X-rite. Seemed to be one of the most recommended.

Let you know how I get on.

T.

B0rG

Depends on what you wanna do with it.

On mine Dell fpw2005 (about year and a half old) difference between calibrated (i got huey) and not calibrated is not really noticeable except perhaps skin tones. But then again - I'm not printing anything.

If you're printing on your own printer - get some printable checker images, print and then manually calibrate monitor so it will display colors one to one. But this is needed only if you're into color correction specifically for extreme cases like this one:

http://club.foto.ru/forum/view_topic.php?topic_id=227168&mode=e

If you're not doing it then the calibrator is not really necessary. IMO.

mikeanywhere

B0rG wrote:

http://club.foto.ru/forum/view_topic.php?topic_id=227168&mode=e

Very handy that Borg - at least the pics are nice!! :rolleyes:

B0rG

mikeanywhere wrote:

Very handy that Borg - at least the pics are nice!! :rolleyes:

heh
welcome to photoshop - you can do one thing with a million different ways.

In that thread you can see examples of almost every approach to color correction

mikeanywhere

B0rG wrote:

heh
welcome to photoshop - you can do one thing with a million different ways.

In that thread you can see examples of almost every approach to color correction

Want to do an english version of it for us non nationals?

magicbastarder

DaireQuinlan wrote:

Yeah thats exactly it, couldn't quite put my finger on it. The problem of course with scanning in film is that the shadows are where the grain is.

and it's not just that - they seem to leave solid black (or close to it) alone, and then with a small increase in brightness in the file, there's a big increase in brightness as presented by the screen, so you get almost posterisation in the shadows.

B0rG

mikeanywhere wrote:

Want to do an english version of it for us non nationals?

Nah

thing is such extremeties not really needed. In two years I'm watching this forum only once a guy asked to correct extremely bad picture. In other cases it's easier to retake a shot than spending a day or two in front of photoshop

Covey

I disagree eith Borg. I think a calibration tool is as essential as any other piece of equipment, especially if your printing yourself. It's not a once off exercise either and needs to be re-done monthly (or so) as monitors deteriorate over time.

It saves it's cost pretty rapidly in printing costs also.

T.

B0rG

Covey wrote:

I disagree eith Borg.

Covey,
I think from now on I will talk about oysters to only people who tasted them.

Bottom line is: if the device for E100 gives you a peace of mind that "your monitor is *calibrated* (whatever it means)" then let it be so. Semi-pro calibrator is around E300, that on top of the new monitor price makes it into professional monitors price range - I'd rather buy pro monitor without the calibrator. And pro calibrators (colorimeters is the proper name) cost around E1000.

Thing is for home user those devices are rather useless, because of following things:

1. Good monitors are more or less calibrated. Mine mid range dell fpw2005 lcd 1.5 years old doesn't display a lot of difference from being calibrated or not calibrated. Worse monitor may do better with calibration. But knowing how much leins spends on lenses I think he has good monitor

2. Human eyes are sophisticated devices - they recalibrate themselvels almost every time you're looking at something.

3. In order to *see* the colors one must have good painters education (mixing paint for 5 years will give you a good understanding of what the actual colors of things are). Without it true red (255,0,0) will look the same to you as the red with blue tint (255, 0, 50) or the red with green tint (255,50,0) rgb values. Look at that link I posted earlier, see what you'll make out of it.

4. Because of that all professional color correction is done "by numbers" - people do not trust their eyes.

5. Other interesting things will happen when you wander into other colorspaces - make yourself a color gradient with 255 colors in photoshop and switch the color profile from sRGB into AdobeRGB, or LAB or CMYK and check if you still see reds as reds or blue as blues. Did you do it? Can you trust your eyes for seeing the colors for what they are?

Now lets move to the reasons why:
1. Peace of mind of having monitor *calibrated* - fair enuff go and buy calibrator for whatever price you can afford and feel better.

2. For color correcting your images:
This has two different ways. Firstly you can do correction by numbers on any kind of monitor. Calibrated or not so - doesn't matter. Read Eismann and Margulis for information how it's done.

Second you want your monitor to display exact colors as your printer prints (more or less of course, as the monitor produce the colors using direct light and what you see printed is reflected light). For doing that there are other techniques. One is to print a test image, have it displayed on the monitor, then using profile building software adjust the monitor to display exact colors as printed by your printer.

To further complicate things there are color profiles for printer, for specific paper, for specific inks, etc etc etc. On top of it it's also possible to build a color profile for RAW convertor.

So to summarise: 100 or 300 euros device will give you it's worth of *calibration* in gold pressed latinum. I'm just saying it's not much as you can easily correct obvious color casts just by using your eyes, and extreme cases will require "numbers" method. For the typical monitor and a printer you just want colors to be the same on both devices and you don't need screen calibrator for that.

Comprendo?

Covey

B0rG wrote:

Covey,
I think from now on I will talk about oysters to only people who tasted them.

Comprendo?

No need really for the smartass comments, it's a discussion forum after all.

You stick to the fish comments, no doubt your level of accuracy will far exceed your knowledge of photography.:p

B0rG

Covey wrote:

No need really for the smartass comments, it's a discussion forum after all.

You stick to the fish comments, no doubt your level of accuracy will far exceed your knowledge of photography.:p

I don't react well to disagreements...

In case you didn't notice...

DaireQuinlan

Covey wrote:

No need really for the smartass comments, it's a discussion forum after all.

You stick to the fish comments, no doubt your level of accuracy will far exceed your knowledge of photography.:p

Or Mollusc comments even

I'd semi agree with Borg though. I calibrated my monitor using tools available online (basically just more sophisticated versions of adobe gamma) and I'm pretty happy with the results. I'm getting good, accurate prints at least to my subjective judgement. All I want is that within a reasonable error range, that images I work up in photoshop and send off to be printed will look the same both on screen and print. Small discrepencies aside thats the case. I'll bet if I wanted to get really into it I could spend a small fortune on calibration devices but, for the time being at least, I don't see the point.

D.

Valentia

Borg, what has that link got to do with colour calibration?? Surely that is about colour correction which is not what this thread is about????

Covey

Nowt.

B0rG

Valentia wrote:

Borg, what has that link got to do with colour calibration?? Surely that is about colour correction which is not what this thread is about????

Valentia, I know you like to argue with me for the sake of just arguing, but bear with me for a second and actually read my post.

The link was used as an example of "extreme cases of color correction".

Covey

B0rG wrote:

Valentia, I know you like to argue with me for the sake of just arguing, but bear with me for a second and actually read my post.

LMAO

Valentia

B0rG wrote:

Valentia, I know you like to argue with me for the sake of just arguing, but bear with me for a second and actually read my post.

The link was used as an example of "extreme cases of color correction".

Yeah??? Your point is???? There was no logic to your post. If you need your monitor calibrated for colour correction you need it calibrated full stop!

B0rG

Valentia wrote:

Yeah??? Your point is???? There was no logic to your post. If you need your monitor calibrated for colour correction you need it calibrated full stop!

I can see through your trick: I wrote a post 3200 letters long, now you want me to create shorter version of it with just 200 letters. This is so not happening...

leinsterman

jaysus lads ... steady on ... it was an innocent enough question ...

as interesting debate all the same ... thanks for the responses ... I am probably more confused than ever ...

but I think I'll go with Valentia's advice and get the spyder ... I'm a serial gadget freak and early adopter (although not in this case) ... this means I regularly fork out my hard earned cash for stuff that ends up covered in dust ...


Borg ... thanks for the useful information, it was very helpful ... but please try to respect that others have opinions too ... and not always the same as yours ...