Ramblings of a Grouch

So you get your PC home, switch it on and away you go. You may tweak the brightness and contrast a little on your monitor if you're feeling adventurous. Then you leave it alone for the next 3 years and never give a moment's thought to the quality of what are actually looking at.

Then you hear about monitor calibration and decide to go down this road to get the best image. And for any serious image work you really should do it.

I used to calibrate my monitors using Adobe Gamma. This is a system of adjusting the settings on your monitor to show the most realistic colours and brightness. It involves matching the luminosity of grey, red, green and blue squares to a similarly-coloured background in order to create an ICC Profile. Essentially. what this means is that all your imaging programs (Photoshop, ImageReady and so on) will pick up this profile and thus display your pictures in exactly the same way. Furthermore, the profile can be used to tie in the colour reproduction of scanners and printers, too.

There is a guide to using Adobe Gamma here (all 10 pages of it) and, when I used CRT monitors (the big, bulky TV-style things) it did a reasonable job. But when I moved on to flat panel LCD monitors it was damn near impossible to use. The reason is that the whole process is based on matching a coloured square overlaid with horizontal lines to a plain background. Viewing the screen normally made this an impossible task (whether that's an indictment of my eyesight or the physical attributes of the screen remains a moot point) and so the recommended method involves squinting at the test pattern through half-closed eyes from a distance of 3 feet. And I could never get the adjustment exactly right - the square was always a bit too red, or too dark, or my eyes would start watering. The end result would be an improvement on the factory settings the monitor arrived with, but that was about all I could say.

Until I tried a hardware method of calibration.

There are several devices on the market, but DigitalMemoriesonline now uses the Colorvision Spyder Express. And what a difference it made! The idea is that you hang this contraption over the centre of the monitor screen, run the software and 20 minutes later your monitor is calibrated. So I drew the curtains and shut the door to keep the ambient light level low and constant, and I fired the software up. Time for a coffee while it does its stuff.

Except I didn't want to open the door, which would affect the light level. Neither could I watch TV for the same reason. Or read a book - it was too dark. I settled for listening to a CD which was a much more pleasant way of calibrating than squinting with watery eyes. And true enough, 20 minutes later A message popped up on screen informing me that the process had been finished and was ready to use. Not even a system reboot required.

And it's amazing what my eyes had got used to. Now my photos look vibrant and colourful. Shadows are dark but retain the detail. Highlights are bright without being washed out. And flesh tones look, well, flesh coloured.

And it may be just my imagination, but I feel my eyes are straining less. Although that may be just a subconscious justification of spending 65 quid on myself.

Until next time ...

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