Calibrating monitors (1 Viewer)

I want to calibrate my (laptop) monitor so my photos appear closer in colour and brightness to my printed photos. Anyone got any tips. As I seem to be haemorrhaging money recently, cheap ways would be particularly good.

Steve

I don't know of any shortcuts to this, Steve (apart from expensive ones).

http://www.normankoren.com/makingfineprints1A.html looks like a good place to start though. If you go through the processes here, could you report back as to how you got on with it?

Don't forget to profile your printer/ink to your paper as well.

Cheers,

Andy.

There are software utilities such as Adobe Gamma that can get some improvement but they are not that good. The only real solution is to use a hardware device to read the screen and work out how to tweak it so that the colours are closer to the intended output. The ColorVision Spyder has come down in price to about £50. There are others too. I have the Spyder (and paid a lot more, damn) and it works well for a CRT display. Be careful that some calibration hardware does not work with LCD monitors. The Spyder I have does. The Warehouse Express site will list some of the available products and then a Google should throw up reviews. Also be aware that laptop displays are not as good as desktop ones (due to constraints of size on the backlight for instance) and so the calibration might not be that brilliant anyway. Maybe if you mention the laptop in the hope that someone else has gone through the same process.

An alternative is to borrow someone elses hardware calibration device, though I'm not sure on the licensing/legal aspects of that and of course I could not advise you to do anything illegal.

Leif

The Pantone Huey is a good little device at about 50 quid
http://www.pantone.com/products/products.asp?idArea=2&showNav=121&idProduct=103

£50 would buy a lot of paper and ink, couldn't you just adjust a bit, test print and repeat until you got it right or as right as you wanted it?

Mick