Monitor Profiling made Easier

A key step in getting accurate color images is an accurate monitor for your color editing and proofing. A good quality CRT or LCD is essential to this process but no matter how good your displays they are only as good as your color profiling software and processes. Good color monitor profiling has always been tricky, but recent software advances have made it much easier. The first of those products that we wrote about was ColorEyes Display, which provided breakthrough pro quality monitor profiles for only a couple hundred dollars.

Now there is a new kid on the block that goes even further in offering pro level features wrapped in a comprehensive wizard interface. Colorvision's Spyder2 PRO version 2.2 will not only separately profile your monitors but can compensate for ambient light and help match all your monitors so you can have consistent color across them. The product itself isn't new but ColorVision has been rapidly extending its capabilities, including adding integrated projector profiling support and bundling it with a state of the art printer profiling package in the PrintFIX PRO Suite.

Wizard-Based Profiling:

It has become quite popular for profiling products to run in the form of a wizard. But ColorVision has taken the concept a step further with a very well thought out step by step wizard interface with easy to read help at each step. The wizard also takes the helpful step of telling you at each step what the "normal" settings are and a little bit about why. The wizard then suggests what to do if the options you choose the first time don't work out. In my case for example, I tried to profile my new Samsung 204T (a nice mid-range 20" LCD) using the RGB sliders to adjust the color temperature but as the wizard warned it didn't work. I then did it again using the color temperature preset and the results were spot on.

Ambient Light Adjustment

One of the coolest new features of Spyder2 PRO is the ability to compensate for ambient light. This has two immdiate benefits. One is the obvious--that if your monitor is bright enough you can profile it accurately even with ambient lighting--rather than being forced to live in the traditional "dark cave" required for an accurate color rendition. The less obvious benefit is that you can use this capability to match two monitors to each other so that you have consistent color across multiple monitors on a single system or even on multiple systems.

In my case I have two systems with 1 CRT and 1 LCD. Frankly the reason for that was to have the LCD as a relatively compact 2nd monitor for email, web browsing and palettes. I never expected them to be useable for color critical work. After calibrating the two screens with Spyder2 PRO I found I had a very close match between the color of images displayed by color managed applications like Photoshop, Bibble and DigitalPro on the two screens. Note that I don't really recommend using both a CRT & LCD if you want to do color correction on both--you're better off with a closer match between monitors--but it is amazing that it is possible at all.