Monitor Calibration
I have been battling for a long time with my monitors. I run dual LCD monitors on my PC and when I am editing pictures I notice that there is a huge difference to the appearance of photos on each of the 2 monitors.
So, I treated myself to a little gift and purchased a little device that would help with calibrating my monitors.
I did a bit of research as to what is available and found that there are a few devices - Spyder, Huey and Eye-One were the ones I found.
After a quick look at what each can do/does, I finally settled on the Pantone HUEY. The calibration system consists of some software and a little pencil like device that plugs in using USB.
When I got it, I had a quick look at the instructions which are quite simple. I set my monitors up to the recommended settings of 6500K. I made sure that my monitors had been turned on for at least 30 minutes, installed the software, plugged in the Huey and followed the on-screen instructions.
The Huey first takes an ambient room light level reading. Then, you simply attach it to your monitor with it's tiny suction cups, lining it up with the picture on your screen. At this stage, I then clicked on the next button and the software went about displaying the Primary colours on the screen and several grey levels from black thru to white. This takes only a few minutes. The Huey "reads" the actual displayed colour or greyscale and generates a custom monitor profile for you.
I was expecting that the calibrated display would be a little darker after reading about it, and it was. What I wasn't expecting was the monitor I thought was pretty close to be so far off!
Once the new profile is created, you can click on a button to toggle to the un-calibrated and calibrated display. I saw a significant colour shift - my monitor was very Yellow!
Now the 2nd monitor I knew was a problem as I had never been happy looking at most of my pictures on it. So, a quick read of the FAQ's on their website on how to calibrate the 2nd monitor on a dual-monitor setup. I followed the instructions and the difference on the 2nd monitor was even greater than the first.
I then piced out a couple of my recent photos and worked on them and produced a couple of files to get printed. I took them and got them printed and came back and compared them to what was onscreen. The colour was very close between what was onscreen and what was in print.
Of course, I also grabbed a few of my older prints and compared the on-screen display to the prints and was not really surprised to discover a slight colour shift between the screen and the prints. Overall it was not too much and the prints looked just fine when I was in blissful ignorance about the calibration.
I choose the Huey for a couple of reasons, and the primary one was price! I also had another reason for wanting to calibrate my display - and that is due to the fact that the Pro Lab I use provides a colour profile for their printers. Up until now, I have been paying a 10% premium for the Lab to apply the profile and do minor colour corrections on any prints I had done. While I only print a small number of large prints each year, the extra 10% was starting to add up.
Now, I will load their colour profile onto my computer and do the colour corrections myself and be sure that everything is as I expect it to be. Not only will I be in more control of the whole process, I'll save that 10% on the cost of my prints and still get a great job done!
