A New Grey
Posted under: *Update: started the computer this morning and it’s reverted back to its old colours. After an hour of fiddling…somehow randomly the monitor finally applied the old colour profiles….FFS…this is an absolute pain…better be worth it
A little background, I’ve been editing photos on my Dell D630 Laptop and using the laptop monitor only….I know this is not a great setup for media based work (especially since my dell is customised originally for business), but it’s fast and at the moment, it’s my only option.
I had a chance today of hooking my laptop up to a calibrated Eizo…oh lord, my monitor has horrid colours. My monitor is cooler and has a slight hint of magenta. My images on the Eizo look super saturated in yellow/green…not very pleasant to be honest.
So straight after work, I got myself a new Spyder 3 Pro from the local electronics shop. Paid $40 premium so that I can have it in my hands tonight as I don’t want to work on any more photos until I have the right colours. In case any one was wondering, I was debating between the Spyder 3 Pro, the Pantone Huey Pro and the Pantone ColorMunki. Colour munki seemed to be designed for designers and less for photographers and a quick forum search found more praises for the Spyder. So I bit the bullet and bought the Spyder 3 Pro.
I have always been lazy about colour calibration as most people’s monitors are not calibrated anyways…so colour calibration is really going to matter when you go to print, or show your photos to a client. I wasn’t doing much of either, so I couldn’t be bothered.
Anyways…after two hours of fiddling with the Spyder 3Pro…I think I’ve finally got a better calibration. The software is easy to use, simple steps…and I don’t doubt that it will take some people 2 minutes to go through the calibration. For me the main issue was that I’m working on a laptop with only backlight brightness controls….a bit shit really. Hence quite a lot of ambient light balancing in order to get the right luminence.
So now with the new profile…I get to go back and re-edit all the thousands of photographs…o fun fun fun. In the meantime I am accepting sympathy donations to buy Bo a new monitor.
It’ll be interesting to see the photos I questioned the PP of after you see them with a calibrated monitor. Both mine are calibrated so it suggests we were seeing very different things.
There seems to be a widely known color profile problem with both Windows Vista and Windows 7, particularly on Intel video chipsets. It may randomly reset the color profile loaded; specially after coming out from power save modes. The only solution I found is to disable “igfxpers.exe” in the startup process,
More info here. http://social.technet.microsoft.com/Forums/pl-PL/w7itproui/thread/e46fd926-e24c-4740-b264-a513f98b1eba
ooo i’lll check it out thanks project xo