Calibrating your Laptop display for perfect colour on the road

Featured Monday, 18 September 2017 15:24

In this video I talk you through the value of calibrating your laptop, and how to ensure you see the correct color in your stills and video when editing in different locations.

This video was sponsored by Datacolor. I have used Datacolor products for years - long before I had a commercial relationship with them. I traveled through Hong Kong, Korea and China doing demonstration and talk for them back in 2015, and I would not use their products if I didn't think they were quality.

Already calibrating with an older calibrator and looking for a change? Now is your chance to upgrade to the top-of-the-line Spyder5ELITE+ from ANY brand! Valid through 9/30.

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Comment Link Monday, 18 September 2017 18:57 posted by John Wright
As a "perfectionist" I'm surprised I am not more of an advocate of calibrating monitors. Twenty five years ago I thought it was very important. Today's LCDs are more consistent than CRTs of ancient days.

While I love the idea of calibrating, I haven't been able to bring myself to spend any money on a calibration device. As you point out, we have no control over the settings of viewer's screens. Viewer variance (often on a tiny cell phone after Facebook has mutilated the image with compression) is going to have far greater impact, in my opinion, than calibrating a good monitor.

For printing an image, this seems like it would be more valuable (so you don't get a print back and have extreme disappointment it isn't like what you saw on the screen).

Naturally a full time pro photographer would have more motivation to spend money on calibration but at this point I'm not sure I see enough value in it.

If I could buy the Spyder5 at the $140 upgrade price I'd do it, but since I don't have an old device I'm not willing to spend $300 on a new device, I'd rather save that money toward buying a better monitor in the future.
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Comment Link Monday, 18 September 2017 19:33 posted by George Gaab
I have heard more and more that professional photographers are not calibating their screens anymore. Plus the last upgrade I got, Spyder5 did not make any difference from my iMac profiles I had done.
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Comment Link Saturday, 30 September 2017 22:32 posted by umano
Screen or a device calibration (scanner printer projector) is a more complex task than the calibration itself, and it is impossible in a video to offer a good solution.

But I agree with the approach and also with the advice on the product mainly for ambient lighting and color adjustment.

Problems in calibration are the eyes the gamut of the various screens or device or material or coating and of course everything changes on destination, web, offset printing, inkjet, papers, video tv, cinema and also marketing has caused serious issues.

As said our eyes are into variable because we compensate for everything so even without calibration in most cases we can see a correct image if the software has color management. That's why most ppl don't feel calibration as must, but it is, it tells us to see images correctly.

I said mkt created serious issues. To have a better contrast they put a polarized glass in front of the screen and everyone here knows that kind of filter works differently with light direction, so even calibrated you'll see a different contrast based on your position.

Again with contrast, for ppl who works with paper the max contrast of the best paper is lower than 400:1 new eizo's have 1500:1

And so on, but one thing is true, you cannot match 2 different screens, gamuts are different contrast are different, sharpening etc.

So this world is very complex, but having a colorimeter is a good start.
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