13. June 2015 · Comments Off on Color Calibration · Categories: patience, Taking care, Workflow · Tags: ,
Blue Bird

Blue Bird

This is really about Calibrating monitors, but first some background.  I have built a new computer system, and on reflecting back, I have several observations that I would like to pass along.  This is also learning from someone else’s hard knocks (LoL).  So I was needing to upgrade my computer system at home; I built in 2007 and at the time it was a hot system, today it is an under powered system.  Not  enough memory (was 16GB, now 64GB), CPU speed of 750 MHz which is very slow by today’s standard, and the disks on the OS  were slow compared to an SSD.  I ported over the Raid 5 of 16TB that has the photos.  It was definitely an exercise in patience.

One of the last things I did was to color calibrate the 2 monitors that I have. One monitor is a Dell wide gamut, the other a run of the mill LCD monitor.  I have, over the years used different products to calibrate my monitors, this timeit was an i1 device.  If you have not color calibrated your monitor, I hope that you don’t do anything to change the color.  This time I was using an i1 display pro for the color calibration.  The way it works is you put the i1Display against the screen and run the software which runs the screen through a series of colors that the i1Display measures against what it is supposed to be, and computes a color profile to bring the monitor in line with the desired.  Very straight forward, except that I found that on the same monitor I could have a huge amount of variation depending on how square the i1Display was to the screen.  The directions call for not pressing it against the screen, and just letting it hang.  The issue is that letting it hang leaves a gap at the bottom, as it is not square against the screen and the ambient light makes a big difference in the final result.

When the color profile is off, it is nearly impossible to produce a reasonable looking print, and web usage of the photo isn’t much better as your monitor is unlikely to match anyone else’s.

Consider the photo below, the background is green, not yellow, and the fence is white.  Avoiding this is the goal of color calibration

Bad Color Calibration That is a white fence rail

Bad Color Calibration
That is a white fence rail

Good color calibration

Good color calibration

Consider the two images, which would you prefer?