Monitor Calibration

[Macker]

hey chaps,

I realise this might perhaps be in the wrong section, but I was curious about how much of a difference monitor calibration can make and whether it is worth investing in the kit to do it? The company almost certainly wont pay to have a specialist/contractor to come in and do it which leaves me with the option of buying the kit (spyder colorimeters, etc) and doing it myself.

What I'm asking I suppose is;
1 - is it worthwhile? I produce architectural visualisations, which sometimes go off for print. So I guess I'd like peace of mind knowing that what goes out of the door is correct, and any colour problems are the printers fault. Also we sometimes have clients come back with comments about colours not being right, which is generally something I take in my stride as the chances are they are viewing it on a crappy monitor, and have no idea about lighting a CGI ("We want a bright sunny day, but no shadows please").

We're using pretty decent monitors here - ASUS ProArt PA248Q, hooked up to Quadro K4000's.

2 - Which colorimeter should I go for? There are quite a few different ones on the market at first glance, and I know literally nothing about them.

[Morne]

We're using the Xrite colormunki and it works great. Also calibrated the plotter and things work MUCH better with it, than without.

The main problem is that people think ok now my stuff is calibrated I can just print left and right and it WILL match the screen always. In a nutshell yes. BUT you have to proof each and every print to each and every printer it will be printed on.

So if you have HP designjet xyz in your office and its calibrated and your monitor is calibrated and you proofed your image for the printer, you can't just save that image and send it of the somebody to have them print it on a different printer because the colours wont be the same on a different printer.

[Macker]

Yeah I'm not too bothered about printing really as I assume the printing company it gets sent to will make sure their colours match what we send them. I just want to have absolute confidence that what I see on my screen is correct, so that when a client comes back with "it looks too blue", I can safely say that either their monitors are crap, or they are colourblind.

[cheerioboy]

+1 for the Xrite

The office I'm at now got the one that also creates printer profiles - so finally we can make half-decent prints...
Also look into View/Proof Setup, in Photoshop - you can switch between monitor RGB & CMYK which seems to have helped in some situations for proper viewing/adjusting.

Goodluck

[DanielBrew]

+2 for X-Rite ColorMunki. Be warned though, you'll hate it to begin with. Most monitors are too bright and over saturated so after calibration everything looks dull and cold.

[Preisler]

Hi,

We have an older Xrite eye one display2 and all monitors are calibrated. Printing from any Adobe application everything works fine but from Autocad it's only strange colors. Most of our printing is through Indesign but sometimes we need to deliver Autocad prints and then we have the problem of uneven colors...


Do you guys now if there is a way to calibrate colors from Autocad?

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

I have both spyder elite pro or something like that and xrite. I like spyder because it can match my studio monitors together and has quite advance B&W calibration. Something my Xrite model is misisng. They both good and best is to have both so that if one fails you can save the day using other one.1234567890-c

[Morne]

Hi,

We have an older Xrite eye one display2 and all monitors are calibrated. Printing from any Adobe application everything works fine but from Autocad it's only strange colors. Most of our printing is through Indesign but sometimes we need to deliver Autocad prints and then we have the problem of uneven colors...


Do you guys now if there is a way to calibrate colors from Autocad?

You could try and manually assign the colour profile that the xrite created for you to your printer in windows colour management. This may override anything you have in adobe and I'm 80% sure it wont work, but it's still worth a try. With that old xrite you guys have, can you create printer profiles in the 1st place?
I geuss the problem with autocad is that there is no proof setup

[Preisler]

I geuss the problem with autocad is that there is no proof setup

...spot on! That is the problem.

No we can't create printer profiles with this Xrite - that was why I was interested in the ColorMunki but I guess the problem is still there if we can't control colorsettings in Autocad?

The printer is a HP z2100 with a build in spectrophotometer but I guess we haven't found out the best way to use it jet. We profile every type of paper by printing out a color charges and let the printer rescan them for color correction of the paper. After calibrations of our monitors we terminate color management in the printer and let the Adobe applications control it. And it works - prints looks very much like the monitor.

What I would love is if we could print out color charges for every applications running on the workstations and then have the printer rescan them for color correction when printing but we probably need a color rip/ server to do that ...any ideas?

Which version of ColorMunki do your guys have?

[Morne]

The box says "colormunki design" if that helps
The software version is 1.1.1.5

[joconnell]

I'm going to get that one too - it's got a nice trick for designers where if you need to get the exact colour from a piece of paper or other printed artwork (logo or corporate colour for example) you can put the device on it and sample to get an rgb value.

[jpmartin]

I had a colorMunki. I was pretty happy with it, but then it went haywire and started giving me very odd color profiles, then died altogether. I was in a pinch and bought a i1Pro (also made by xRite) to get me back on track.

The colorMunki definately has more capabilites than the i1, but it's only worth the extra money if you use those features. I never had much luck with the color sampler. I tried using it to scan paint samples but the results on screen still needed some color correction to make it look true to the sample (could very well be my lighting environment is throwing things off too).

I'm very happy with the i1 Pro, and I would say it does a very good job with profiling and calibration. I think it's around half of the price of the munki, so definitely worth a look if all you need it to do is profile and calibrate your monitors.

[DPS]

I'm also after a calibration device. If I'm intending on printing photographs but not using my own printer - would I still get the benefits from being able to calibrate against print samples?

Or do the print shops handle that side of things providing I have produced my image on a calibrated monitor?

[Morne]

It's still worth getting it.
Only the large "pro" shops know what they are doing. The average small little print shop on the corner never heard of color management or color profiles - they only know "save your jpg as a cmyk 300dpi"
There's always the exception to the rule however.

[YoyoBoy]

I have a 3-year-old Spyder Elite 4, and I swear it calibrates things differently every time I run a full calibration. Sometimes it has me set my monitors too bright, sometimes too dark, and I just ran a full calibration just now, and it made things noticeably yellow tinted.