How important is monitor calibration?
How many of you out there calibrate your monitor with a Spyder or something similar? Whether you do or not, how important do you feel it is?
Personally, I use a Spyder2Express. I tell my clients that there's no way to make sure that the color will appear the same on everyone's monitor, but the best thing to do is get it to appear correctly on a color-calibrated monitor. Then everything else will tend to average out.
Megan posted this at 13:23 — 27th March 2007.
She has: 11,421 posts
Joined: Jun 1999
We've had trouble getting the APC colours to work right on laptops in particular. So you have to keep that in mind when choosing colours as well.
But yes, for a designer it is vitally important to be working with a calibrated monitor. If your not you could have all kinds of strange results without even knowing it. And test your pages for colour on other monitors too.
I'm a little fuzzy on the best way to do this - usually I use the Adobe calibration tool if I think there's a problem. do you have a link to that Spyder program?
Megan
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Roo posted this at 02:58 — 28th March 2007.
She has: 840 posts
Joined: Apr 1999
I also calibrate with Adobe's thingy. I shoot a LOT of photos, and my prints match what is on my screen, so I figure I'm doing okay.
I must say though that when my trusty old Sony Trinitron died about a year ago, and I had to buy an LCD monitor, that calibrating the LCD is a LOT harder that the old monitor was.
Roo
demonhale posted this at 05:47 — 28th March 2007.
He has: 3,278 posts
Joined: May 2005
I agree, I also match mine, although my printer now doesn't match my monitor (Inks running out), I just save my print and monitor profiles when I go and have it printed outside...
Also I tried to color match in pantone as much as possible for the printers, coming first from the print field taught me that matching color palettes does make a difference when making a design on screen and printing them in paper... (And don't forget types of paper also affects color and light absorption which could affect the overall scheme of the printed material)...
Greg K posted this at 06:14 — 28th March 2007.
He has: 2,145 posts
Joined: Nov 2003
I believe the one Tim was talking about isn't software, but an actual hardware device you hook to your monitor.
-Greg
demonhale posted this at 06:21 — 28th March 2007.
He has: 3,278 posts
Joined: May 2005
Yes, a spectrophotometer, I use a small one, it connects to your PC/Mac and also saves an ICC profile, the profiles I saved as mentioned, is the one from the calibration of the hardware spectrophotometer...
timjpriebe posted this at 12:30 — 28th March 2007.
He has: 2,667 posts
Joined: Dec 2004
Greg and demonhale are correct. The Spyder2Express is actually a pretty neat device that you temporarily hang off the top of your monitor to calibrate it. It's in the low end of ColorVision's Spyder family.
Tim
http://www.tandswebdesign.com
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