# Anyone here calibrate their monitor(s)?



## parish (Jun 29, 2006)

Specifically using a Datacolor Spyder3 Pro. Just bought one and struggling to get a match between two monitors.


----------



## bretti_kivi (Apr 22, 2008)

It's kind of normal. I use a spyder occasionally on the two at home and the two at work and no two are 100% identical: however, the differences between calibrated and non are good enough for me to say "it's acceptable".

Bret


----------



## nicks500 (May 12, 2011)

is this a pc or mac with two screens/dual-head? or is this two different pc/mac's with single screens


----------



## Brazo (Oct 27, 2005)

Is this software or hardware?


----------



## johnnyh (Jun 20, 2011)

Never tried getting two monitors to match, mine is used to get my monitor and printer aligned when editing then printing photos


----------



## tmitch45 (Jul 29, 2006)

Hi guys how does this work? Im thinking of getting one as I adjusted some pics in photoshop and they looked fine on the screen but the colours were all over the place. I'm thinking this is my monitor thats not setup correctly?


----------



## bretti_kivi (Apr 22, 2008)

it depends, it might be the monitor, it might be the printer.

The spyder is a USB hardware dongle which is put over the screen and then the software runs to get white point, black point and then red, green, blue points.

If I remember correctly, they're not particularly expensive and pretty effective. I use one on both my notebook LED and 20 wide TFTs at work and teh 17 and 15 TFTs at home. Correction on all is "close enough" for what I'm doing and that the printer says "it's fine", especially when combined with a printer profile.

If you want accurate colours, you *must* calibrate. You have no choice. How you do it is another story (Huey, spyder, something else) - and whether you're comparing absolutes to prints is an important question. At least the Spyder asks why you want it when you start the process, along with the requested gamma; using the standard 5600K + 2.2 gamma works well for me.

Your mileage may vary, but calibration should not be underestimated. Also: *do not change the the colour space between the camera, the picture software and the printer; if it's sRGB, everything must be set to sRGB, if it's Adobe, the same. If it is not consistent, you will get strange colours.*

Bret


----------



## nicks500 (May 12, 2011)

*spyder3studio*

I have the spyder3studio (well the previous version anyway). you will need something like this to calibrate your screen and profile your printer properly so you can print colour accurate pictures, very expensive and if you can borrow a friends then thats even better:thumb:
It works very well for an 'amateur' system but will never replace a professional lab but even then you will still want to calibrate your monitor before you send the files


----------



## parish (Jun 29, 2006)

bretti_kivi said:


> It's kind of normal. I use a spyder occasionally on the two at home and the two at work and no two are 100% identical: however, the differences between calibrated and non are good enough for me to say "it's acceptable".
> 
> Bret


It's acceptable - almost - but should be closer.



nicks500 said:


> is this a pc or mac with two screens/dual-head? or is this two different pc/mac's with single screens


Mac. MacBook Pro and a Dell 2408WFP 24" monitor. This is a decent (high even) quality monitor. It's a couple of years old but got excellent reviews in its day. Cost nearly £500, so not cheap.



Brazo said:


> Is this software or hardware?


Hardware, this one



johnnyh said:


> Never tried getting two monitors to match, mine is used to get my monitor and printer aligned when editing then printing photos


Well, I'm doing it for printing purposes, though not my own printer, but any commercial print shop, e.g. Photobox, should be using calibrated printers. The thing is, if I can't get my two monitors to match how do I know which one, if either, is correct?

The reason i've bought the Spyder is that i've had some prints where the skin tones are off and also large areas of white, e.g. a wedding dress.

As Warehouse Express are selling these for £88 I decided to take the plunge.

Anyway, the issue I'm having is that the first calibration run I did I took all the defaults. For the MBP screen I selected Laptop and it set the defaults to:

Gamma: 2.2
White Point: 6500K
Brightness: Native
Ambient Light: Off

There was a noticeable improvement - the app has a "test card" of photos and you can switch between before and after - even though I always thought the screen was damn good "out of the box".

Then I did the Dell; reset it to factory defaults; selected LCD as the screen type and it used these defaults:

Gamma: 2.2
White Point: 5700K
Brightness: 120cd/m^2
Ambient Light: On

After, the colours were much warmer than the MBP screen, which was to be expected with the White Point at 5700K, so I ran it again, but changed the White Point to 6500K and turned Ambient Light off. Now it was much closer, but still not quite right. Orange is a mile out. I have a some pics of an orange car and it is significantly more saturated on the Dell than on the MBP.

After some searching I found a site called www.tftcentral.co.uk which has an in-depth review of my monitor including detailed calibration tests - http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/reviews/dell_2408wfp.htm - and to achieve the best results they set the monitor to Custom with the RGB set to 92, 90, 98 (which, if my knowledge of colour is correct should reduce orange) and the brightness to 20%. I tried this but the brightness was 180cd/m^2 (and all the reviews I've read say 120 is the optimum value) so I reduced it to 120 - 9% on the monitor brightness setting - but still orange is noticeably more saturated.

Unless I've got seriously defective colour vision (and I wear glasses so have my eyes tested every few years and have never been told I have problems with colour vision) then the two monitors do not match. They are much closer than you could ever get manually - manual settings are linear, but the monitor's colour response is not - but surely, the whole point of using a colourimeter is that the colours will be the same on any calibrated device, at least the differences should be (almost) imperceptible to the human eye. OK, so the Spyder3 Pro isn;t the best on the market, but I still expect it to get the settings so close that I can't see the difference.

*Edit*: Here's a photo of the two screens. Not perfect, but the colour difference in orange is clearly visible.


----------



## nicks500 (May 12, 2011)

I dont think its going to work, I used to have a dual 23" apple cinema screens and I could get them to match perfectly with a spyder2 (that doesnt make the apple monitors better, far from it as your Dell is probably better than the apple screen. the thing is apple screens are built to a very close tolerance to each other, so matching between 100's of screens in a graphic design house would be a lot easier, not that they would use apple as they would probably use Lacie for the important colour work) so I can only think there is too much difference between the Samsung based panel of your Dell and the Apple macbook pro. What I would do is just use the mac not in mirrored mode but in a dual head scenario and use the Dell for editing the pictures and use the mac for toolbars, palettes etc (or vice versa) and get that relevant screen to a colour you are happy with. 
Concerning labs, the few labs I have used were happy to do some test prints till the lab I and were happy with the quality.


----------



## tmitch45 (Jul 29, 2006)

All my photo printing is done by a lab but I still think i need to calibrate to ensure when altering in photoshop what I'm seeing is what I'll get is that correct?


----------



## nicks500 (May 12, 2011)

When you calibrate one of the screens like the Dell for instance, are you happy that it is colour correct? compare it to a known physical thing, a picture of a friend maybe, are the skin tones correct, thats really all you need to do then the lab will create a printing profile for you. As long as you get it as close as possible the lab will do the rest.


----------



## bretti_kivi (Apr 22, 2008)

this is where you see what happens when you use a professional lab and one like photobox.

Get the ICC profile from the printer and use that for your print calibration - *anything else will be off*. If the printer can't provide the ICC, walk away. Go through loxley, test a couple of small prints, having used their profile, and see the difference. It'll cost you a fiver or so and an hour of time.

Sorry, you're accusing the monitors of something that's not their fault (and for most non-calibrated monitors, too much red is correct, especially LED ones...).



> All my photo printing is done by a lab but I still think i need to calibrate to ensure when altering in photoshop what I'm seeing is what I'll get is that correct?


three important things if your colour is important to you:

- calibrate the monitor
- use the printer profile
- make sure all the colour spaces are the same

If you're working for the web, don't worry too much about the printer profiles, as you won't need them. Professional level printing *must* work with a profile. The differences you see on the monitors above are still "reasonable" in my eyes (make sure you darken the room first and the monitors should have been on for at least 30 mins, preferably an hour before calibrating) - and *don't change the brightness afterwards!*

You may also need to ensure that Windows 7 uses the profile - mine used to be overridden by Intel's gfx driver. Disabling that and then setting the profile as the default in windows and then also a trigger for an "apply profile" after every lock / unlock means it sticks.

This is a very big can of worms (as if that's not already obvious) but the results are worth it.

Bret


----------



## bretti_kivi (Apr 22, 2008)

Just re-reading that, it seems a bit stand-offish.

I'll explain a little:
Even the best monitors can't display the whole set (gamut) of colours. So the colour spaces define a specific subset which will be used and displayed. Therefore it's possible if you use the "wrong" one, you'll get different colours shown, depending. I'll try to demo this when I'm home and have some serious time.

The printer has an output which it thinks is correct and the monitor has an output which it thinks is correct. Calibrating the monitor without checking the printer is pointless, as is doing it the other way around. The ICC profile is usable for pretty much any pro-level printer. In simple terms it defines the "levels" of RGB (or CMYK) which would produce a specific colour - meaning that this is the printer calibration tool par excellence when you have one. 

Set the monitor up first, by all means, but don't ignore the other output. A profile - I've found - is a good indicator of whether the print shop gives a toss or not. I've normally had no problems when delivering to a decent printshop directly from my calibrated laptop, and I've done that enough times to know that it generally works. Photobox? Dump 'em IMO. I've had exactly the same experience.

Bret


----------



## bretti_kivi (Apr 22, 2008)

A couple of links that might help:

http://www.smugmug.com/help/srgb-versus-adobe-rgb-1998
http://www.cambridgeincolour.com/tutorials/sRGB-AdobeRGB1998.htm

and this is a good explanation as to why in GIMP you should always have GEGL on and for ultimate quality, JPG is useless: http://www.earthboundlight.com/phototips/srgb-versus-adobe-rgb-debate.html
(JPG is an 8-bit format....)

Bret


----------



## AcN (Nov 3, 2010)

I use an Eye-One Display 2 with the LaCie BlueEye Pro software, works great. (Dell UltraSharp 2709WFP main monitor, i use a crappy TN 22" as second monitor)
For printer, i ask my printer to calibrate his stuff according to the paper i want/need (who doesn't love the Crane Museo paper ? ). Cost a kidney to print a picture in A3 size, but it's worth it.
Only reason i don't buy a printer is because a good one going up to 17" with the ability to use rolls is way too expensive for my needs (i'm not a professional, and i don't sell photos, I just hang them somewhere at home...)

Anyway, i guess Bretti_Kivi explained it very well in post #14


----------



## Buck (Jan 16, 2008)

Parish

I think you are highlighting the differences and limitations of each monitor. The important piece is to get a profile from your printers (I wouldn't use Photobox from experience - try other - DSCL are highly recommended http://www.dscolourlabs.co.uk/index.cfm)

Then compare their physical output to what you see on your monitors and fine tune from there.

edit:; just read the above posts - I concur with the others !


----------



## alexj (Apr 12, 2012)

*Make sure your camera, monitor and printer are talking the same language

http://photo.net/learn/digital-photography-workflow/color-management

Good luck*


----------



## BigAshD (Feb 23, 2012)

I've done it on PC with two monitors and Mac with two monitors with great success (I've been a semi-pro photographer for about 10 years). 

Have only used the Gretag Eye-One but (1) make sure you have the correct monitor selected (sounds stupid, but you'd be surprised) and (2) make sure that all software interference from your OS is switched off. You'd be amazed at how difficult this can be, and you'd need to look on photography forums specific to your setup (calibrater and hardware / software - i.e. Mac OSx or PC and Windows variant). (3) In the photo app you're using, make sure that it is using your calibrated monitor for the COLOUR SPACE - this is software specific but you'll have no probe finding instructions for Photoshop, Aperture, Lightroom and all the major apps.

Good luck.


----------

