Turkey Vulture (redux)
Today, I finally broke down and calibrated my monitor and I'm seeing a huge difference. This photo is a re-do of the picture in the comment stream and, at least on my machine and my wife's laptop, I can see a huge difference. Before calibration, everything seemed to be coming off of my camera way too bright so I was darkening everything in Photoshop to compensate. Now, those shots look way darker than they did before calibration. What do you guys think?
I've received a couple of questions regarding monitor calibration so I'm adding the text of my email response here. Hopefully, this will provide enough information to clarify what I did to effect this change. I can't give you a full technical explanation of what happens when a monitor is calibrated but there are a few places on the web where you can get some more detailed explanations. However, I can tell you a bit about why I wanted to calibrate and how I did it.
First of all, I do almost all of my work on a laptop computer. However, that computer is normally sitting in a docking station through which all of its connections are made (network, mouse, keyboard, external hard drives, etc...) including connecting it to an LCD monitor. When I happen to take the laptop out of the docking station and use its builtin screen, my pictures would look different than when I would view/manipulate them using my external monitor. This was a concern for me because I didn't know which display (if either of them) was showing me the right representation of a particular picture. When I would look at some of the work that I had done on my laptop with another computer I would, once again, see a difference. Especially in the darkness of the photo and the saturation of its color. As a result, I decided that it was time to look into calibrating. On top of all of that, I decided that I wanted to make some prints of my work to frame and give as gifts for Christmas this year. However, when I would have the prints made, the color always seemed a bit off and, in some cases, way off. Ultimately, I decided that all of this had to be resolved.
What I ended up doing to resolve this was to purchase a colorimeter manufactured by a company called Datacolor (www.colorvision.com). The package consists of a piece of hardware that can be connected through your computer's USB port that they call a puck and some software that controls it. The puck is simply an electronic eyeball that you place on your monitor screen so that the software that comes with it can "see" what you see. The software itself is simply a wizard that runs you through the calibration procedure. It will ask you make some adjustments to the monitor manually and then it will run through an entire color palette so that it can create a profile for your monitor. Most of the process is automatic and the whole thing takes about 30 minutes to complete. The result is that you end up with a monitor that is now calibrated to a visual standard.
If you look at the redtail hawk and turkey vulture pictures that I have most recently posted, you will see that the biggest difference it makes is in regards to brightness. If we just focus on the turkey vulture shot, both of these pictures were created from the same raw file from my camera and then processed into the final pictures that were uploaded to Flickr. When I did the first one, I was using my un-calibrated monitor and I produced an image that looked great on my monitor but looked way too dark on everyone else's. After calibrating, I performed the exact same tasks on the original raw file and produced another picture that looked the same to my eye as the original one did when I created it. However, when the two are compared side-by-side the first picture looks far too dark and lacking in detail on my now properly calibrated monitor.
The long and the short of it is that I was pretty sure that I was not seeing color and brightness properly and this exercise proved that to be the truth. I have now calibrated all of the monitors for all of my computers (believe it or not, I own 5 of them right now) so that they all see color the same way. This does not affect how you see what I produce but it does affect what I create and it means that I'm seeing the color on my monitor the way that other calibrated monitors will see it.
So what did all of this cost me? I ended up buying the Syder 2 Suite package through an internet reseller for a grand total of $89.00 plus shipping. This came with the hardware and software for calibrating my monitor and some software for creating a color profile for my printers (something I haven't worked with just yet). I found it through pricegrabber.com and you might still be able to get it there for the same price as I did. I figured that with all of the money I've got tied up in camera and computer equipment, 89 bucks was a small price to pay to be sure that I was seeing the right colors and intensity on my monitor.
Hope this helps. If you have any further questions, don't hesitate to ask.
Turkey Vulture (redux)
Today, I finally broke down and calibrated my monitor and I'm seeing a huge difference. This photo is a re-do of the picture in the comment stream and, at least on my machine and my wife's laptop, I can see a huge difference. Before calibration, everything seemed to be coming off of my camera way too bright so I was darkening everything in Photoshop to compensate. Now, those shots look way darker than they did before calibration. What do you guys think?
I've received a couple of questions regarding monitor calibration so I'm adding the text of my email response here. Hopefully, this will provide enough information to clarify what I did to effect this change. I can't give you a full technical explanation of what happens when a monitor is calibrated but there are a few places on the web where you can get some more detailed explanations. However, I can tell you a bit about why I wanted to calibrate and how I did it.
First of all, I do almost all of my work on a laptop computer. However, that computer is normally sitting in a docking station through which all of its connections are made (network, mouse, keyboard, external hard drives, etc...) including connecting it to an LCD monitor. When I happen to take the laptop out of the docking station and use its builtin screen, my pictures would look different than when I would view/manipulate them using my external monitor. This was a concern for me because I didn't know which display (if either of them) was showing me the right representation of a particular picture. When I would look at some of the work that I had done on my laptop with another computer I would, once again, see a difference. Especially in the darkness of the photo and the saturation of its color. As a result, I decided that it was time to look into calibrating. On top of all of that, I decided that I wanted to make some prints of my work to frame and give as gifts for Christmas this year. However, when I would have the prints made, the color always seemed a bit off and, in some cases, way off. Ultimately, I decided that all of this had to be resolved.
What I ended up doing to resolve this was to purchase a colorimeter manufactured by a company called Datacolor (www.colorvision.com). The package consists of a piece of hardware that can be connected through your computer's USB port that they call a puck and some software that controls it. The puck is simply an electronic eyeball that you place on your monitor screen so that the software that comes with it can "see" what you see. The software itself is simply a wizard that runs you through the calibration procedure. It will ask you make some adjustments to the monitor manually and then it will run through an entire color palette so that it can create a profile for your monitor. Most of the process is automatic and the whole thing takes about 30 minutes to complete. The result is that you end up with a monitor that is now calibrated to a visual standard.
If you look at the redtail hawk and turkey vulture pictures that I have most recently posted, you will see that the biggest difference it makes is in regards to brightness. If we just focus on the turkey vulture shot, both of these pictures were created from the same raw file from my camera and then processed into the final pictures that were uploaded to Flickr. When I did the first one, I was using my un-calibrated monitor and I produced an image that looked great on my monitor but looked way too dark on everyone else's. After calibrating, I performed the exact same tasks on the original raw file and produced another picture that looked the same to my eye as the original one did when I created it. However, when the two are compared side-by-side the first picture looks far too dark and lacking in detail on my now properly calibrated monitor.
The long and the short of it is that I was pretty sure that I was not seeing color and brightness properly and this exercise proved that to be the truth. I have now calibrated all of the monitors for all of my computers (believe it or not, I own 5 of them right now) so that they all see color the same way. This does not affect how you see what I produce but it does affect what I create and it means that I'm seeing the color on my monitor the way that other calibrated monitors will see it.
So what did all of this cost me? I ended up buying the Syder 2 Suite package through an internet reseller for a grand total of $89.00 plus shipping. This came with the hardware and software for calibrating my monitor and some software for creating a color profile for my printers (something I haven't worked with just yet). I found it through pricegrabber.com and you might still be able to get it there for the same price as I did. I figured that with all of the money I've got tied up in camera and computer equipment, 89 bucks was a small price to pay to be sure that I was seeing the right colors and intensity on my monitor.
Hope this helps. If you have any further questions, don't hesitate to ask.