My First Calibration - Partial Success?

My Spyder3Elite arrived today! Not a day too soon...

In lieu of a long step-by-step rundown of the "out of box experience", let me just say it was easy, a tad time-consuming, well worth it, but not perfect. Here's what I was trying to do:

I have my laptop (on which I run Adobe Lightroom) attached to a desktop monitor as a "proofing" screen. In Windows parlance, I'm running two monitors using "extended desktop". The primary monitor is my laptop, and the proofing happens on the extended desktop (large monitor on my desk). The two images used to be hopelessly not similar. Now they are tolerably almost similar, and I think I can trust the desktop monitor once again.

My Spyder hanging on my desktop's monitor
(ignore the gold cast - it's a function of my phone's lousy white balance)

Here's what I learned:

• Michael Riechmann and Jeff Schewe were absolutely right - you can't do anything serious related to color when using a laptop's monitor. Not only does mine have a HUGE difference in apparent luminosity depending on vertical viewing angle (the tilt of the screen), but its "gamut" is not sufficient to fully represent the sRGB color space! My desktop monitor, on the other hand, covers sRGB reasonably well.

Note how the red plot (my desktop monitor) matches the green sRGB plot
...but the laptop's monitor falls well short

• My first attempt at calibration didn't get both monitors to look the same. When I tried "recal" in a workflow that was designed to match the two, it came closer - but not perfect. Perhaps this is due to the difference above - my little laptop monitor is trying as hard as it can to reproduce reds, but is failing - so the desktop more accurately displays the red tones.
  
• If I want to do any SERIOUS color prep for fine art prints, then I'd better save up to buy a really good monitor that can cover the AdobeRGB (or better) color space - otherwise, I'll never know what I'm adjusting and the prints will be hit or miss.

The next experiment, of course, is to see how well all of this matches print output at my favorite lab. THAT part of the "colour" management workflow I haven't studied enough yet (how do I tell Lightroom what the printer's profile is when I'm not printing directly?). Stay tuned...

Calibrating My Monitors

I have a confession to make: I have never calibrated my monitor. I guess I was just lucky - but my luck ran out when I recently got a new laptop...

When you have nothing to compare to, you don't know how much trouble you're in. Every once in a while I'd get prints back that looked quite a bit different from what I recalled seeing on screen, but I didn't think too much about it - until I got a new laptop. The difference between what I'm seeing on the laptop and what I'm seeing on the extended desktop monitor is, to say the least, stunning - and not in a positive sense.

I find I am now in a state of  "color confusion", and all my editing makes no sense whatsoever. This is, of course, the point at which all serious photographers will be smirking and thinking to themselves, "What rock have you been hiding under?"

The good news is I've decided to climb out from under the rock of color ignorance and finally learn about calibrating, profiling, color gamuts, luminosity, color spaces, and other heretofore mysteries of the professional color workflow. Here's what I've done so far:


STEP 1) Tried to find someone on the web who has recorded a half-way intelligent yet friendly technical explanation. There are many youtube videos on the subject, but I wasn't satisfied until I went back to my favorite stand-by site, www.luminous-landscape.com - and found exactly what I was looking for. OK, it cost me $16.95, but that bought me a very entertaining set of 4 hours of instructional (and humorous) dialog and demonstration called "L-L Guide to Colour Management" featuring Michael Riechmann and Jeff Schewe.

STEP 2) I wanted a bit more on the techie side, so I found some helpful articles in Wikipedia, such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_gamut

STEP 3) I coughed up some cash to buy a display calibration device and software. I have no idea if I bought the BEST one, but I was certainly impressed that DataColor's Spyder products 1) got great reviews, and 2) are offering a rebate on their discontinued version 3 products, and 3) the price is dropping like a rock. So I chose a Spyder3Elite setup from B&H Photo Video - $168 with shipping, $138 after rebate (for a product that had been selling above $225). It arrives on Thursday - I'll let you know what happens.

STEP 4) In searching for a better monitor, I found a TERRIFIC professional photography blog at HP called (not surprisingly) "Professional Photography". It's FULL of great articles, including some specific to color management by guest blogger David Saffir:

• Screen-to-Print Match for Photographers, Part 1: Adjusting Your Monitor
• Screen-to-Print Match for Photographers, Part 2: Proof Before You Print
• Reflections on Becoming a Professional Photographer - which includes the obvious recommendation, "Get your color workflow locked down".

...to which I now embarrassingly can say, "It's about time..."