Calibrate screens

bikeit

Senior Member
I recently bought the Spyderx elite calibration tool and would like to have all my screens the same, I have a laptop which is in the studio and a PC at home which i use all for photo editing, the laptop is usually connected to a large Dell monitor which is the same monitor i use on the home PC. so how do i calibrate all the screens so they are all identical? TIA
 

Fred Kingston

Senior Member
You calibrate the Monitor for the computer it's connected to. It should create two different drivers. 1 driver would be for the laptop and the laptop screen, and the other would be for the laptop w/the monitor connected. If you look at your display settings for just about any computer, you'll see usually more than one driver...

If I want to Proof an image in Lightroom, and select LR's Color Proofing, I'm given the option of setting my monitor's driver to any one of dozens of paper profiles, and a dozen or more Monitor profiles...
 

Fred Kingston

Senior Member
Sure... The reason we calibrate our monitors and the reason why paper manufacturers develop create paper ICC profiles is so that when we create color images, whether on paper or for screens is so that the Red I see on my monitor is the same Red that YOU see on your monitor. The same holds true for printing. If I send an image to be printed at a service bureau, I want to be sure that the image comes back with the same Red that I saw on my monitor when I created it. Different papers handle ink differently and different monitors under different lighting conditions handle colors differently. Calibration systems adjust those colors to known calibration standards...

Lightroom lets you select the paper/monitor the image will be viewed under. This is referred to as Soft Proofing... After you've loaded your paper's ICC profiles (into Lightroom) you can select the paper your image will be printed on. You might notice a slight color and/or exposure shift when you switch between the monitor's profile and the paper's profile. If you do, you can make slight adjustments in LR with the paper's profile selected so that what you see on the screen ends up being what you see on the piece of paper.

One of the primary aspects is the light in your work area... The calibration software begins its color calibration by analyzing the ambient light that you view your monitor under and then adjusts everything from there... Laptops are sometimes problematic because they frequently get moved around and what you see in one room under less than optimum conditions will be different that if you sit outside in bright light. Some calibration software runs an agent in the background and continually monitors or periodically checks the ambient light and makes adjustments to the profile as needed.

There have been books written on this process, and a great deal of this technology is built into Lightroom. There are also several videos that walk you through the Soft proofing process/workflow for Lightroom...
 
Last edited:

bikeit

Senior Member
Thank you, much appreciated, so as i dont do any printing i need to find out from the local guy who does all my printing what paper he is using and the printer he is using? is this correct?
 

Fred Kingston

Senior Member
You don't need his printer. It should be pretty agnostic with regard to printers. You do need to know about the paper. Most printing bureaus have a page dedicated to their specific papers and profiles, and which generic ones and/or where to get ICC profiles.
 
Top