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gregbradley
28-06-2015, 04:37 PM
I have upgraded my monitor now I need a physical colour callibrator. What is considered the best? I have heard of a spider calibrator before. I don't know much about their models though.

greg

Octane
28-06-2015, 05:57 PM
There's a new Spyder out I believe.

ColorMunki's are popular, too.

H

gregbradley
29-06-2015, 07:06 AM
Thanks Humi I'll check them out.

Greg.

RickS
29-06-2015, 07:17 AM
Greg,

The i1 units work well too. There's quite a bit of info on the Image Science site (http://www.imagescience.com.au/).

Cheers,
Rick.

gregbradley
29-06-2015, 07:35 AM
I ended up ordering the Colormunki Smile. Its $109 at Digidirect which is a store I know and it rates well in this top 6 calibrators review:

http://www.digitalcameraworld.com/2014/02/25/best-monitor-calibrator-for-photographers-6-top-models-tested-and-rated/

Greg.

dannat
29-06-2015, 11:27 AM
best thing to do is join a local camera club & borrow theirs -our local club has one avail for free for a week [once per year]
the spyder's do seem easy & accurate

LewisM
29-06-2015, 11:30 AM
I use a Spyder. Interesting how if you run it with successive iterations the differences you get between each - that dismayed me somewhat (I run my calibrations at night in a fully darkened room, so there should be very little variation).

I paid $149 delivered for my Spyder, so you did well Greg.

Garbz
30-06-2015, 10:36 PM
Hey just a quick note if you use a colour calibrator and all your Pixinsight settings are at deafult, Pixinsight will set the working profile to any images to the monitor profile.

So when you save it either a) always embed the ICC profile, or b) convert the profile to sRGB or you may suddenly find the image doesn't look right.

Nico13
30-06-2015, 10:54 PM
I've been using the Spyder system for a few years and I'm pretty happy with it for my monitors and printer as well.
I did find most software that is used for imaging looks for a colour profile and uses what is set by the Spyder or the Munki for that matter.
Windows slide show however never did and screen saver slide show were always heavily over saturated but they seem to have fixed that recently.
Both are good units for their price.

troypiggo
01-07-2015, 05:31 AM
Same goes for all images, in any image processing software (eg Photoshop). If you're displaying on web, best to convert the image to sRGB.

Garbz
02-07-2015, 12:34 PM
Well most other image processing software does not change the working profile, but rather keeps the working profile at default (sRGB or AdobeRGB) and converts to the monitor profile in realtime for display purposes.

Pixinsight is the first program I've come across that actually changes and saves the monitor profile as the working profile of the file which is quite strange behaviour.

RickS
02-07-2015, 01:20 PM
That would be strange behaviour indeed, Chris, but it is not something I've ever experienced in PI. The only time I've seen the default profile attached to an image is when it didn't have one to begin with, e.g. when creating an RGB image from individual red, green and blue channels.

glend
03-07-2015, 02:11 PM
Greg did you get that Colourmonki? My new editing monitor just arrived so I'm in the same boat. Looking forward to your feedback.
Cheers Glen

Garbz
03-07-2015, 04:27 PM
Do you also use a calibrator? It would be interesting what your PI Colour Management settings look like. This is something I have never touched or changed yet on both of my PCs the settings appear as per the attached screenshot showing that for files generated by PI it applies the monitor working profile. It would be interesting to know if this is something I have done or if it is actually PI's default settings. (I never changed any settings in here).

If you don't calibrate your monitor then the monitor profile is sRGB so it stands to reason that this wouldn't be noticed in normal circumstances.

troypiggo
03-07-2015, 05:21 PM
Here's a post I made on the PI forum some time ago about PI colour management.

http://pixinsight.com/forum/index.php?topic=4022.0

RickS
03-07-2015, 05:27 PM
G'day Chris,

Yes, I calibrate and by default the default profile in PI is that of my monitor, or at least it would be if I didn't set it to ProPhoto RGB (once set PI remembers the new preference.)

When you create a new RGB image it doesn't have a profile so I guess attaching one that corresponds exactly to what your monitor can represent makes a degree of sense. I'm sure that if you ask on the PI forum that Juan will have a good argument for why it is that way ;)

Anyway, it is easy to change the colour management configuration to whatever suits you and this appears to be a time honoured tradition. The first thing most books on colour management tell you is that you need to change half the colour settings in Photoshop.

Speaking of colour calibration... has anybody seen the latest Eizo 4K monitor with a calibrator built in? Lovely looking piece of kit but not much change out of $7K :eyepop:

Cheers,
Rick.

RickS
03-07-2015, 05:37 PM
Incredibly short and pithy, Troy! :lol:

troypiggo
03-07-2015, 05:40 PM
D'oh. Pasted link now :)

glend
03-07-2015, 05:57 PM
Not more PI advertising. Plenty of that elsewhere.

troypiggo
04-07-2015, 06:22 AM
Not sure what the beef is, but we are talking about colour calibration and settings here. If you've interpreted that as shilling PI, that says more about you than us.

Sorry Greg. FWIW I've had the Spyder 2 and 3. Very happy.

multiweb
04-07-2015, 06:42 AM
That's an extra pack of six for you, right there. :lol:

gregbradley
04-07-2015, 08:56 AM
Sorry Greg. FWIW I've had the Spyder 2 and 3. Very happy.[/QUOTE]

Thanks Troy.

I settled on the Colour Munki as it was cheaper and actually rated slightly better than the Spyder so on paper it sounds good. I liked the fact its easy to use and scored a very high score for colour accuracy after calibration. But any would be an improvement over doing it by eye with a laptop screen.

Greg.

glend
04-07-2015, 09:52 AM
Greg's original question: "I have upgraded my monitor now I need a physical colour callibrator."

troypiggo
04-07-2015, 10:21 AM
And the thread evolved into colour management with colour profiles developed from calibration hardware. A natural and relevant digression, and on topic.

Nothing further from me on your tangent.

troypiggo
04-07-2015, 10:27 AM
That's the main thing. I came to the conclusion that as long as your use some form of calibration hardware, any of the above-mentioned, you're on the right track. Any differences would be almost negligible to the difference between no calibration and calibrated.

RickS
04-07-2015, 10:45 AM
I think the main difference between the low cost calibrators is the ease of use of the bundled software. They are all basic colorimeters with adequate accuracy.

The higher end (more expensive) devices are spectrophotometers and make measurements at a larger number of wavelengths. That's useful if you want to do printer profiles but probably overkill for monitor calibration.

Cheers,
Rick.

Garbz
05-07-2015, 09:17 PM
Thanks Rick for your earlier post. There's nothing wrong with assuming a colour profile of the monitor, it's just the first time that I've seen this as the default action where every other program out there assumes one of the standard profiles and then simply converts the output to match the profile of the calibrator.

In any case we're slowly getting to the point where colour management is becoming native enough that we don't need to do it. We're not far these days from being able to send anything to anyone and having them correctly display it :-)

RickS
06-07-2015, 08:17 AM
I'm not that optimistic, Chris :)

There are still a bunch of sites, e.g. Astrobin, that strip ICC profiles from images they display. There are still browsers and image display utilities that don't do colour management or turn it off by default. There are lots of default monitor profiles that don't match screens.

I just posted a poll with an image that displays dramatically differently with/without colour management. It won't prove anything but hopefully it will be entertaining: http://www.iceinspace.com.au/forum/showthread.php?t=136481

Cheers,
Rick.

Garbz
06-07-2015, 11:57 AM
We're a whole world better than we were 10 years ago. :lol:

My personal favourite is Chrome which will colour manage only tagged images, but do so for the monitor profile. So if you have a colour calibrator and a monitor with an abnormal gamut Chrome will display a standard sRGB image and an image with the sRGB ICC profile embedded differently.

This actually caused me grief after the last astrofest where I posted a picture that everyone said looked too hot, but looked fine on my computer. :screwy:

gregbradley
08-07-2015, 06:43 PM
I got the Color Munki. Easy to use which is a plus. I have a question though.

Do colour callibrators check for colour accuracy only not the level of saturation?

So could the colours be correct but your monitor shows the colours as too saturated?

Greg.

RickS
08-07-2015, 07:18 PM
Calibration should cover hue, saturation and brightness. It won't help with applications that aren't colour managed, so you may still see stuff that doesn't look right.

Cheers,
Rick.