Mar
10
So you just plopped down $1,000+ on one of the latest hip digital SLR cameras. You got hooked on taking photos and on your next trip to the camera store, or bhphotovideo.com if you are smart, and burned up your plastic for another $1,000 in a nicer lens, tripod and flash. You ate up Circuit City for a few memory cards, a nice bag and some other gear. Now you are out taking photos like mad and uploading them to the web for everyone to see.
After spending hours toiling in Photoshop and getting everything just right, you print it out and it looks like crap. What happened? I am going to tell you a little naughty secret about the LCD/CRT Monitor industry. The default settings on your monitor are meant to sell the monitor, not accurately display the photos you are taking. Scary, but true. Tonight I calibrated 3 desktop monitors and a laptop with a color calibrator and I can tell you that the vivid colors that your monitor is showing, even worse if it’s a glossy, are way off.
In all 3 cases: A 15″ Apple Macbook Pro, (2) Samsung 204b 20″ LCD’s and an HP 24″ LCD, the monitors reset to default were very very cool, with some seriously odd colors. I had noticed this to be the case on the new 24″ monitor when I downloaded this wallpaper:
On the Samsung’s it looked ok, but on the HP it was nearly blue looking. The car was very blue and the natural yellows in the sky were very nearly gray.
After trying in vain to get them to look closer to the Samsung monitors, I decided to shop for a color calibrator.
Much to my surprise I found one and it’s very versatile and at $55 US, extremely reasonably priced.
I chose the Colorvision Spyder2Express. It supports Mac and PC, as well as with a software update via the website, 64-bit Vista and XP. WIN!! The only flaw is that it does NOT support dual monitor setups. I was able to calibrate the primary monitor, but not the secondary. I applied the same profile to both monitors instead of being able to profile them separately. I can tell you that Samsungs are very high quality monitors and I honestly can’t visibly tell a color difference between the two. I am sure if you have a dual monitor setup with two different brand or model monitors, or even similar ones that were manufactured far apart, you may not have the same luck. They do make a Pro model that supports dual monitors but it’s over 3 times the price.
You will go back and look at photos you have edited and be amazed at how far off they are. The downside is now you need to calibrate your printer to make sure everything is even. The even bigger downside is that you need to calibrate it every time you use a different brand/type of paper. There are hardware devices to do this as well but they are MUCH more expensive.
As I do not really print much with my photography hobby, it’s not quite as important for me. To learn more about color calibration, read the Wikipedia entry. To learn more about Colorvisions hardware devices, check out their website.
To try and calibrate your monitor manually or just read more on the topic, check out Dry Creek Photo’s page on the subject.
