Calibrating My Monitor-what I learned today!

[Stacy Morin]

I have had a Color Munki Display Calibrator for oh I don't know 3 or so years I'd say. I started calibrating my monitor because I was told in other forums I should. I have hated that thing ever since! Whenever I "Resart" or "Shutdown" I love the Calibrated Profile! But if I restart again and twirl on my heals and clap three times -SOMETIMES it comes back! Yea! So today it did it again and I was pissed! So I call X-Rite-the company that makes it and I got through to a nice enough guy that walked me through a ton of steps on my computer in my settings of Windows 7 to "keep" the profile when I do it. He also helped me to Calibrate in Advanced mode and Voila! My Monitor is great!!! He also did this for free and after 1 year should have charged me $29.99 for a 30 min convo! I had NO idea whatsoever about what I needed to do to my computer first to make the calibration "stick"! Did you all know this? I hope my new knowledge helps if anyone else has had difficulties with calibrating!!

 

[Ysarex]

X-Rite.

 

[Andreas Timm Photography]

I have had a Color Munki Display Calibrator for oh I don't know 3 or so years I'd say. I started calibrating my monitor because I was told in other forums I should. I have hated that thing ever since! Whenever I "Resart" or "Shutdown" I love the Calibrated Profile! But if I restart again and twirl on my heals and clap three times -SOMETIMES it comes back! Yea! So today it did it again and I was pissed! So I call X-Rite-the company that makes it and I got through to a nice enough guy that walked me through a ton of steps on my computer in my settings of Windows 7 to "keep" the profile when I do it. He also helped me to Calibrate in Advanced mode and Voila! My Monitor is great!!! He also did this for free and after 1 year should have charged me $29.99 for a 30 min convo! I had NO idea whatsoever about what I needed to do to my computer first to make the calibration "stick"! Did you all know this? I hope my new knowledge helps if anyone else has had difficulties with calibrating!!

Thanks for sharing. Calibrating for sure is not a bad thing. BUT:
- Relatively to what are you calibrating?
- E.g. if you calibrate your monitor you have to consider light condition in the room - your eyes will see very different if the room you have your monitor in is daylight vs. at night etc.

So don't get me wrong: Good to have a color management process... but if you are serious about it you would need to keep all points in the chain constant or re-calibrate if something changes (e.g. you turn on the light in the room where your monitor is... this changes how your eyes see contrast / light of the image on the monitor.... )
Almost impossible to be completely correct across the whole chain (Camera, Monitor, Printer, Display environment...) unless you handle this in a very professional way and invest time /money.

I personally do not do it (anymore). I just use an ok monitor (Imac) - the rest is creative chaos... ;-)

Happy to hear other opinions...! ( keep it comin... )

Enjoy Photography!

Andreas

 

[KmH]

I routinely recommend X-Rite over other calibrators.
So do most online labs and most editing experts.

 

[Andreas Timm Photography]

I routinely recommend X-Rite over other calibrators.
So do most online labs and most editing experts.

So if you read my post above: How do you make sure you keep calibration correct all the time? How do you do this when light conditions change? You do calibrate every day? Every hour? Or is your room with the monitor always the same light condition?

Don't get me wrong: Good if you calibrate your device once in a while - I just experience all the time how much change happens e.g. when changing the monitor brightness just a bit - or how just switching on the light in the room I am working in changes the contrast of the monitor. etc.

So how do you calibrate this? Do you always have constant light conditions?

Thank you for sharing!

Best,
Andreas

 

[Scatterbrained]

I routinely recommend X-Rite over other calibrators.
So do most online labs and most editing experts.

So if you read my post above: How do you make sure you keep calibration correct all the time? How do you do this when light conditions change? You do calibrate every day? Every hour? Or is your room with the monitor always the same light condition?

Don't get me wrong: Good if you calibrate your device once in a while - I just experience all the time how much change happens e.g. when changing the monitor brightness just a bit - or how just switching on the light in the room I am working in changes the contrast of the monitor. etc.

So how do you calibrate this? Do you always have constant light conditions?

Thank you for sharing!

Best,
Andreas

I think you're seriously over thinking this. A decent calibrator will take ambient light into account. Determine what time of the day you normally edit in and calibrate at that time. Simple. I calibrate my monitor at night with the main room lights off since those are the conditions in which I normally edit. I softproof all my images using the provided profile from the lab before printing. I've had no issues with color consistency between edits and prints. It's not too difficult.

 

[KmH]

If the ambient light falling on your computer display changes you have to re-calibrate.
That is one reason why mobile device displays don't work very good as image editing platforms.

Yes, I have my computer set up so it has constant lighting conditions.
So do the print labs that offer color correction.
I re-calibrate a minimum of 13 times a year - every new moon. The online print ;abs re-calibrate regularly too.
At the start of an editing project I sometimes re-calibrate in between as a precaution.

 

[JacaRanda]

I just set mine to calibrate once every two weeks and to monitor the ambient light and auto correct as needed. I can't recall the time intervals.

Pretty much a set it and leave it scenario until time to re-calibrate.

 

[dannylightning]

I use a program called quickgamma, it is free and easy, my screen no longer had a blue tint to it., the whites look pure white now, it got rid of the slight blue tint from the main screen i use.

than i did the same thing to my other screen which also had a tint to it and pics looked different on each screen, my pics look almost exactly the same on both screens so i am going to say this must do a pretty descent job. I am sure there are better options than quickgamma but for the average person it should do the trick..

i was thinking about getting one of those calibrating things till someone told me about the quickgamma.

i have not printed any prints to compare how they look compared to my monitor, some day i still might get one of the X-rite calibraters

 

[Ysarex]

I routinely recommend X-Rite over other calibrators.
So do most online labs and most editing experts.

So if you read my post above: How do you make sure you keep calibration correct all the time? How do you do this when light conditions change? You do calibrate every day? Every hour? Or is your room with the monitor always the same light condition?

Don't get me wrong: Good if you calibrate your device once in a while - I just experience all the time how much change happens e.g. when changing the monitor brightness just a bit - or how just switching on the light in the room I am working in changes the contrast of the monitor. etc.

So how do you calibrate this? Do you always have constant light conditions?

Thank you for sharing!

Best,
Andreas

I work under constant indoor ambient light. I re-calibrate regularly to keep both my display calibration up to date as well as my display profile which is created by the hardware calibrator and which my editing software uses. Calibrating a display with a colorimeter or spectrophotometer does two essential things. It adjusts the white point, brightness and contrast of the display and it also profiles the display. What display profile does your editing software use?

Joe

 

[spacediver]

If you are releasing your work to the rest of the web community, and/or are interested in viewing content that has been encoded with a particular set of standards in mind (e.g. sRGB), then I highly recommend calibrating your display. Presumably when you create your art, you are moulding the image (colors, tonal qualities) based on your own visual perception. If your display is calibrated differently to someone else's, then they will see a rather different image when they view your art.

As for lighting, if you can afford a good D65 bias light and can remove other sources of illumination, then you're in a good position.

Don't ignore gamma - I use a gamma of 2.4, but some content is encoded with 2.2 in mind. It might be useful to have a couple different gamma profiles for different ambient lighting conditions and/or different content.

Of course, some of these considerations I've just listed do not necessarily apply if you're mainly interested soft proofing your work, and trying to simulate the perceptual conditions of printed material under various viewing conditions.

btw, I notice a lot of people use the term "calibrator" when they should be using the term "colorimeter", or "spectroradiometer" (btw the i1 pro is actually both a spectroradiometer and a spectrophotometer). A calibrator is someone who calibrates

 

[weepete]

I don't do tons of editing, maybe only once a month or so. I just calibrate the screen before I start and it seems to work pretty well. As mentioned above, mine has an ambient light monitor in it so leaving the colorimeter on adjusts for any changes in the ambient light levels during editing.

 

[bratkinson]

The Colormunki gadget that goes on top of the screen to calibrate has sat alongside my monitor ever since...per their directions. It appears to be sampling the light perhaps once every couple of hours. On two occasions, it even stopped and displayed a message that it has to recalibrate. As my computer is in a converted bedroom now dining room, the lights from the chandelier (8 small CFL bulbs) and 2 windows varies considerably during the day and evening. I just let it "do its thing" and am very happy with the results. I couldn't have invested part of my tax refund this year in a better tool for my photography!

 

[limr]

Okay, I have a question.

I don't have any calibrating programs other than what came with the computer (which I bought just a few months ago when my old one crapped out suddenly.) It's a laptop. I tried using it but honestly, it just confounds me. Perhaps it's just the program or the light or my lack of experience, but as I was going through the steps and looking so closely at the images I was supposed to match in order to get good calibration, I had less and less confidence that I could trust my eyes. I ended up canceling any changes I made (which were barely even noticeable to me...at least by the end of the process.)

How does one calibrate a monitor and still trust what you see? The eyes and the brain are tricky things and what you think you see is not always what is actually on the screen. The whole thing felt kind of like a mind f*** to me.

 

[Ysarex]

Okay, I have a question.

I don't have any calibrating programs other than what came with the computer (which I bought just a few months ago when my old one crapped out suddenly.) It's a laptop. I tried using it but honestly, it just confounds me. Perhaps it's just the program or the light or my lack of experience, but as I was going through the steps and looking so closely at the images I was supposed to match in order to get good calibration, I had less and less confidence that I could trust my eyes. I ended up canceling any changes I made (which were barely even noticeable to me...at least by the end of the process.)

How does one calibrate a monitor and still trust what you see? The eyes and the brain are tricky things and what you think you see is not always what is actually on the screen. The whole thing felt kind of like a mind f*** to me.

You're right the eyes and brain are very tricky and as soon as you want to see something odds are you will.

To calibrate a computer display you don't use your eyes and you don't use that built-in software. If it's all you have the software only route can make bad into not so bad or differently bad, maybe even better but, as you've noted, it's hard to trust your eyes. Calibrating a display requires a hardware solution like this: smile

The link is for an inexpensive colorimeter. It comes with software and basically that software takes control of your display while the colorimeter hangs in front of the display. The software then for example shows a color or tone on the screen and the colorimeter measures what's actually there. Then either the display can be adjusted to produce the desired result or any discrepancy can be noted and included in the profile for that display. Editing software will then attempt to compensate for any discrepancy.

Joe