LCD Calibration

[kiev4a]

Never have really calibrated my LCD display at work or home. I knew both weren't spot on as any color word done at the office had to be tweaked in the prepress department before going to print.

The other day I borrowed a new calibration unit called Eye-One Display that can be used on both tube and LCD screens and ran it on my office LCD. It all was pretty much automatic and now my screen actually matches what comes off the press. Tonight I'm going to run it on my home LCD, too. It produces an ICC profile that can be used as the screen default and also loaded in PhotoShop as your RGB setting.

The version I used has been superseded by a newer model. Eve-One 2 and they seem to run in the $200 range. If you do a lot of color work on a tube or LCD I think it probably be worth the investment (or borrow one like I did)

[Peter S.]

I would like to report, that I ordered a Spyder2 a week ago. But it has not arrived yet.
I ordered it in the US - because of the low Dollar rate ;-)
If anyone is interested, I can tell You about my experiences when I came beyond my very first
real feedback.

The background to my journey into all that color management stuff is the first few series
of scanned slides I let print out some time ago. I tried a few shops. But the only satisfactory
results were done on a minilab in the shop of a small and kind photographer. He let me look
on the screen of the minilab, tweaked it while discussing with me, whether there were some
color cast or not, I could add some additional sharpening on one, and we did generally reduce
contrast a bit. The pictures that came out did look _very_ good to me.

So I decided that I want to gain a tighter control over the color in my scanning and processing
chain. I knew that there is scanner calibration/profiling via IT-8 targets. The only hustle is that
one needs specialized scanning S/W, that either is horrifying expensive (Silverfast for Nikon
LS9000 is about the price of a Epson 4990 or two) or are said to be buggy, instable and plagued
by fundamental design flaws (Vuescan).

I started reading what I could find on color management (e.g. www.rit.edu/~med2823/colormanageproject/index.html).
And I decided to start it up with the monitor first. Then in the next step I will try to tweak the
Nikon scan S/W to get the color gains and gammas matched (those seem to be slightly off).
And then IT-8 calibrating/profiling may even become unnecessary (that is at least what I hope).

Best regards
Peter

[nikonbob]

Wayne

Thanks for posting on the subject of Colour management which has always baffled me. I am going to check out Eye-One 2. I like option 2, borrow one.

Peter

Thanks for the link, I think it is going to help me get a better handle on colour management. I have always shied away from it not being computer literate. It might now be the time to dive in and get my hands dirty.

Bob

[kiev4a]

It's not too difficult to eyeball color settings for web photos. But when you are doing a color book cover you have to know exactly how things are going to look. The amount of adjustment than can be done on the press is minimal. Plus for printing you are working with CMYK rather than RGB.

[nikonbob]

Wayne

Yea, I have got it eyeballed good enough for web use, I think, but when using my printer the output is a little off, Close but no cigars, that is why I am going to get more into colour management. I have got to get the PC, scanner and printer talking the same language.

Bob

[herron]

I've been meaning to get some kind of color management tool for a while now, to make sure I can print what I see on my monitor. Right now, it's a trial by error set-up. Works OK now, but it's not exact. I've been involved in publishing for my whole career, and I know there are some good systems out there now to help match RGB and CMYK output...and to calibrate a home system.

It's just that elusive "round tuit" again...along with a heavy demand elsewhere for the money in the cookie jar!

[SidW]

I have an old version of ps, which includes Adobe Gamma, a wizard for setting up screen callibration. The real difficulty I've experienced is that monitors have become successively brighter over the years, turning jet black into dull grey. My latest, a flat screen, was too bright to be set up. Each colour is set by tweaking two image fields until they become identical, but this time the best I could do was minimise the difference without getting them to be identical. It seems to have worked, and images processed on it look ok whenever I've had the chance to check them on other monitors. Adobe Gamma creates a profile that is set as default. Once that's done, my prints (from HP 895Cxi from around 2000) match the on-screen image when printed from ps.

I use Vuescan to scan film, (previously with Canon 2700F, now with Nikon Coolscan V) without encountering any bugs, instability or flaws.

I've always been advised to do a minimum of image processing in the camera (if digital) or scanning program (if film) and do it in ps (or other good image processing program) instead. So it doesn't matter if raw images or film scans look a bit odd, it all comes right when contrast and colour balance etc. are optimised in the image processor.

[Peter S.]

I have now used that Spyder2 colorimeter on two monitors.

For the Eizo S2000 I use at work the difference was only a slight one: the calibrated and color managed monitor
looks a wee bit warmer than it did before.

Against that the visible impact for the old Samsung Syncmaster 180T (which did cost me a lot of money five years
ago) was dramatic. Images tweaked on that machine do need to be re-adjusted.

I will calibrate my other monitors (an Eizo S2100 on my main machine, an HP LCD and a Compaq P910 on two more
machines) starting today, one monitor per day ;-) . And I am very curious, whether the uniformity that is advertised
will really be achieved. But my first impression is that it was money well spent.

Best regards
Peter

[kiev4a]

The trouble with eyeballing LCD monitors is that moving your hear even slightly during the process can change the brighntess level.

After running Eye One I printed out an Internet page with several color photos of furniture. The printer image color matches the screen image almost exactly.

[Randy]

I got carded by the LCB once back in the '70s.

[kiev4a]

Just got back my first color proof from pre press of a cover I did after calibration with the Eye-One. It's dead on -- better than I did with the tube monitors!