Calibrating Your Screen

Working with images on a computer is cleaner and easier than in a darkroom.  The biggest problem you face when editing digital images is colour!  Colour management is the foundation of all editing on a computer.  If you don't see the correct colours on screen, how can you expect the prints to match up?

What can I do?

Colour management is not really a painful process.  There are many new products which take the stress out of calibrating your screen. One such device is the Spyder 2 Pro by ColorVision.  This handy piece of kit will save you much hassle and money (in badly coloured prints) and only costs around £180.00 from here.

The Spyder is a sensor which connects to your computer. You then follow the on screen steps and the Spyder will automatically generate a colour profile for your screen.  After this process you will have a fully calibrated screen which is the start of printing what you see on screen!

Using the Spyder 2 Pro

We will leave the ColorVision Spyder step by step guide for their website and cover a rough guide to how the Spyder works.

The Spyder is compatible with Windows and Mac and includes the necessary software on CD.  You will find a USB cable and the Spyder unit in the box.

Before you attempt to calibrate your screen, you must have already been using it for approximately 2 hours to allow the colour / temperature to settle.  After installing the software and connecting the Spyder device you need to start the software.  You will select the type of screen you have (LCD or CRT) and then be guided through the calibration process.  You will be asked to place the Spyder unit onto your screen using the attachments.  Following the on screen prompts, the software will then display a range of colours which the Spyder unit will read and measure.

After this has completed, you will be asked to save the newly generated screen colour profile and it will be set as default automatically.  You now have a correctly calibrated screen and can begin embedding profiles into your images.  For more information on embedding profiles into images please look here.