Monitor Calibration

[arnie187]

can u callibrate a monitor lcd..with out the aid of a spyder

[GeoffWessex]

A Google on 'Monitor Calibration' will return a lot of good results... there are several other calibration equipment options available. Some of the alterations they suggest can be quite severe and I've heard of many people who have run various tools, calibrated their monitors and hate the result! Spyder, among others, does give accurate calibration but look at it another way - put lots of pictures online and ask the viewers to comment on their brightness (colour saturation is a more personal and subjective opinion). Compare what your's look like up against others - if yours are brighter (looking a bit 'washed out'), then I'd suggest your monitor is too dark. If yours are darker you may have a monitor that's too bright.

Another test.....
Take a picture (jpeg) directly from your camera and put in on your computer. Edit it so that it looks at its best and give it another name. So then you have two files, same image, one edited and one not.
Upload them both to a website like Flickr (or here). If there's a difference, then your monitor is either too bright (if the edited image is darker), or to dark (if the edited image is brighter).

[KeithT]

Hi Arnie. Calibrating monitors has always been a bit of a mystery to me. Firstly you have to ask yourself why you are doing it? And secondly whether it will improve you imaging workflow even if you did. Most monitors are set for the sRGB colour space yet many amateur photographers using photoshop still insist aRGB to be best for their workflow and upload that space to the web. What they get is insipid colours and they can't understand why.

I have always thought that trying to calibrate a monitor that wasn't intentended for photo editing to be a bit of a nonsense and by and large it is. My reason for saying this is simple: if you buy into a cheap monitor no amount of calibration will make it suitable for image editing, but they are OK for office work and web browsing for which they were intended. So, what does one do to get a good image? The first step is to buy a decent monitor. Pro monitors are really expensive and often outside the budget of most of us. But monitors suited to gaming and video editing are reasonably priced. My choice was an HPw2207, and though a couple of years old is still a cracking wide screen monitor for photo editing. Yes, it needs calibration from time to time, but this is mainly with the gamma. In windows 7 you can easiily adjust the gamma by using the inbuilt tool, but here's a free download that you might find useful: http://www.calibrize.com/index.html

I also check out my monitor with this free tool: http://www.photofriday.com/calibrate.php

I have never had an ounce of trouble with accurate colours on my monitor or prints I have had done from a pro lab. Good luck.