Monitor and printer calibration

Hi all!

I'm in the market for monitor and printer calibration tools. Thought I would

access the great minds on here and get some of your takes on what I should buy.

I have a dual monitor setup, both LCD's and a Canon i9100 printer. Running

Vista on a dual core pro. TIA!

Mike

In order to calibrate both a monitor and printer, you need a device that can measure emitted light (monitor) and reflected light (prints) using a built-in lamp. These devices tend to be expensive compared to monitor-only calibrators, but IMO worth every nickel.

Various companies make suitable devices. I use an X-Rite (formerly Gretag-MacBeth) Eye-One Photo kit. The same tool is used in kits as little as $900, but the software to calibrate prints, cameras and monitors brings the price to about $1500. CMYK calibration is another $600 or so. There are free instructional videos on the X-Rite/Gretag-MacBeth site that show exactly how the equipment is used - a convincing pre-sales concept.

If you're just getting started with Vista it's not to late to install XP Pro, with Microsoft support no less. Between Vista's registration policies and the reluctance of vendors to commit to an unsettled O/S, you may end up waiting months (or indefinitely) for compatible drivers for some devices*. Make sure your calibration kit is Vista-compatible.

* Microboards (disc duping and printing) announced that they have no intentions of writing print drivers for Vista. We'll see about that long-term, but for now that's how it is.

For a real-world calibration, I would do it by eye. You can do all sorts of fancy computer stuff and still be off.

Shoot a MacBeth color checker chart used in the print industry, and match it to your monitor the same way you'd color balance a silver color print. All you have to do is match the contrast, and then decide how to balance using red, green, and blue.

Keith

If it were that easy, who'd buy a calibrator ;-)

When you "balance" things by eye, you generally consider only the mid-scale values. Consequently, you neglect control in the darker and lighter portions of the print. In some cases, this may be good enough - case closed. When you calibrate by machine, curves are drawn over the entire range of luminosity in all three colors (or four). You see a lot more shadow detail using a well-crafted print profile profile.

I calibrate prints by hand (with a guide) using a target with about 600 patches, which allows relatively smooth curves to be drawn. Targets read by robot arms can be much larger.

'When you "balance" things by eye, you generally consider only the mid-scale values. Consequently, you neglect control in the darker and lighter portions of the print."

I do not!

Keith

The printing process is decidedly non-linear. For example, the dot gain effect varies with the amount of ink applied. When you make color adjustments by eye, you generally use no more than three points to make the correction, and often just one in the center of the curve.

A calibration program measures reflectance values over a wide range in each of the three colors, compares each measurement to the value in the reference file and constructs a curve. It is likely that the curves are calculated using 3rd or 4th order orthogonal polynomials, which are hardly "intuitive". As I said, I measure nearly 600 patches and automated scans can measure thousands. This process has to be repeated for each new type of paper and as the printer ages.

A second benefit of accurate profiles is that you can use them to render a soft proof in Photoshop. This is a convenient and useful way to see how the image will appear in print, test various rendering schema, and detect gamut problems.

And all this time I thought I could do it just by a-twistin' them yeller and magenter nobbs.

Keith