From: "bob"
I have PS CS2 running with a pair of monitors, an Epson 2200 printer and a HP 5200 scanner. I need to calibrate then so colors match. All the tools I have found seem to cost $800 to $1000. Is there a tool to do this for less money or maybe a way to rent 1 once per year?
If you are a single person operation doing your own images, there is no need to spend even one cent on calibration equipment. The effort of calibrating your monitor manually is good for you, since it gives you a relatively easy color adjustment challenge. It’s helpful, but not at all necessary, to have an experienced person to help you through this.
Having said that, monitor calibration devices are reasonably priced, and you may want to save yourself some time and effort and calibrate your monitor with a device. The most common ones are the ColorVision Spyder and the Greytag-Macbeteh Color Eye-One. I recommend getting one that specifically supports LCD monitors – if you don’t have one now, you will sometime in the future.
For the remainder of this post I’m going to assume that you would like to save your money.
1) CRT monitors may be accurately adjusted with Adobe Gamma. Make sure you can distinguish the dark bands, and that the gamma bars are as close to matching the hatch patterns as possible. Set your monitor temperature to 5500, rather than the default (and very blue) 6500.
LCD monitors are another story. Adobe Gamma’s gamma slider does not work with them, and because they are based on different physics than a CRT, an LCD monitor’s response curve does not follow the gamma function of a CRT, and it is easy to get color casts in the middle of a neutral gradient. Certain LCD’s appear to be unfit for accurate color work, and at this time I would recommend that you use a digitally driven LCD, and perhaps augment that with a Spyder or Eye One color.
If you have a mixed LCD and CRT setup, use the CRT for the image and the LCD for your tool palettes.
2) Provided you stick with Epson’s materials, Epson printers do relatively well with their canned profiles, PhotoEnhance setting, or sRGB. I would recommend that you start with that as your basis for printing before deciding whether to move on to more expensive solutions. Your 2200 is a pigment inked system, and your prints will look different in tungsten, fluorescent, and daylight conditions.
If you are using non-standard ink or paper, you may be able to adjust the Epson’s color controls to get a satisfactory result. Another alternative is to have a service create a profile for you. Accurately calibrating a printer yourself will probably require a relatively expensive colorimeter – in the neighborhood of 1000 US dollars. Cheaper solutions may turn out to be unacceptable. There are software solutions that use your scanner to profile your printer, however they will not work reliably, in part because the scanner’s light source does not match your viewing conditions, and in effect changes the color of the printout.
3) Scanner calibration is another interesting issue, and I would again caution you against spending money up front in hopes of making your scans match your input perfectly. Check out www.scantips.com, where there is some discussion about your scanner, as well as good information on scanning in general.
Conclusion
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Overall, I think many people are frustrated trying to get their screen, printer, and scanner perfectly in sync. This is evident in a number of discussion groups, where any color problem is attributed to a poor "color workflow", or lack of monitor calibration. I have a somewhat different take on this: get your equipment reasonably good, then use color correction to take you the rest of the way to excellent color.
The key is to use Photoshop’s ability to precisely measure colors, and to color correct "by the numbers" as a way to get high quality color, rather than relying on the accuracy of your monitor to make color judgements – this is questionable in any case because of effects like color accomodation.
The most important operations when color correcting are setting the shadow and highlight. This is not difficult, but is somewhat more complex than looking at the histogram, and/or clicking the black and white eyedroppers that Photoshop provides in the Levels and Curves dialog.
Second most important is getting rid of a color cast, generally by setting a neutral. This means fnding an object that you know should be gray, and changing the image to make that object gray.
There are a number of other things you can do to improve your images, but shadow, highlight, and neutral are the most important.
Your monitor provides you with the best prediction of the overall appearance of the image, and therefore should be calibrated as carefully as possible, to the point where neutral colors are displayed correctly, and you can view shadow and highlight detail in a step wedge of 16 steps, with perhaps the darkest two steps somewhat harder to distinguish. Once you have achieved this, you will have no surprises in terms of an overall color cast, or the amount of shadow or highlight detail.
On a CRT you can also be reasonably confident that your colors will match your final printout, but don’t count on this – bright blues are notorious for fading and even turning purple when printed. Monitor calibration devices are more affordable and may save you time. I particularly recommend them for multi person shops, or when images will be exchanged with others as part of a professional workflow. Photoshop supports "soft proofing", however it is of very limited usefulness, IMHO.
The Curvemeister class starts on Jan 1. If you have Windows Photoshop or Elements, you may take the class using the demo version of Curvemeister. You will learn shadow, highlgiht, and neutral, and other items including how to set skin tones, and these principles may be used in Photoshop, with or without the Curvemeister plugin.
http://www.curvemeister.com/support/class/index.htm —
Mike Russell
www.curvemeister.com
