Colorimeter for CRT profiling

Pixmaker wrote:

After switching to digital for a lot of my work, I’m about to upgrade my monitor, printer and vider driver. But it seems that I better invest in a colorimeter to obtain a real measure of what my monitor is doing. I’ll appreciate some help in deciding whether I really need all this stuff <G>

New Printer is an Epson 2200…now on the way.

Monitor probably an Iiyama 19" Diamondtron (boy are these things confusing.)

Video card will be a Matrox 450 or 550 depending on what deal I can get.

With this mess, do I really need a colorimeter? If the answer is yes, what do you all think of the Monaco OPTI- XR. It’s about $250. Will it be sufficient for my needs since I’m a photographer, not a graphic designer. I don’t do pre-press…allI want is fairly predictable prints. I use PS-7 and I’m hoping to set up a REPEATABLE system so that when I look at an image on my monitor, it’s as close to WYSIWYG as possible at a reasonable expense.

Am I headed in the right direction?

Buy a car that goes faster, rather than a more accurate external speedometer, or better speakers rather than a sound spectrum analyzer. By the same token, I suggest that you save your money, or invest it in a better monitor rather than a device to measure your monitor. Though these devices may be valuable when multiple monitors need to be kept reasonably similar to one another, I highly question the validity of using a colorimeter in a single monitor setup.

Google for group postings about the spyder and read the comments and problems of purchasers of this device. My conclusion from most of these articles that a lot of people make some initial errors in their Photoshop color setup (easy to do), get frustrated (again easy to have happen), decide "what the heck" and spend the couple of hundred dollars, and are disapointed when a CRT colorimeter does not result in perfect screen/print matches. In fact they find that buying a colorimeter is only the first step in the quest for perfect color, and they need a better or newer monitor, spectrophotometer, etc.

So, start by setting your system up carefully with Adobe Gamma, and a generic profile or driver settings for your Epson. This may well give you excellent results, provided there are no errors in your Photoshop color settings. Ian Lyons has a good description of PS color settings for versions 6 and later here:
http://www.computer-darkroom.com/ps8-colour/ps8_1.htm

So you need to educate yourself. After you have made sure that your basic setup is solid, and after ensuring that the colorimeter will address a specific deficiency in your system, rather than a vague overall improvement in the color fidelity, it may be time to buy.

When I first started off with Photoshop, coming from a darkroom background, I did test strips to get particular sections of my image looking as I wanted. At that time test strips were still a way of life, and the newly found convenience of not using a darkroom was overwhelming enough that I did not mind doing test strips. This is no longer necessary. I find I can match shadow and highlight detail, and overall brightness and color saturation quite well from the monitor. In addition, the info palette provides a flawless method of determining shadow and highlight detail and neutrality.

I do rely on the monitor heavily to judge overall brightness and color saturation. When making a large Super B print, I generally print a small 5×7 test print just to make sure I’m happy with the overall appearance of the image. For my better prints, I do a fairly large amount of color correction using curves, and this is much more important to the final result, I feel, than the calibration of my system.

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Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com
www.geigy.2y.net