so met up with a high level interior photographer today and was inistant on the importance of colour calibration
however the unit he uses is well beyond my budget at a grand :blink: (not to mention everything else in his studio!)
do any of you know if i would get good results with this?
given i have a macbookpro with an anti glare screen, how well can you even calibrate these screens? is it worth all the money and effort?
I did mine with a Spyder and frankly it was a waste of time, didn’t make any discernable difference.
Otherwise no I don’t really have experience. I use a page of t’internet with a grayscale on it to test brightness etc every now and again but that’s about it.
Seems to me the trouble is that other people will look at your work on their random screens and then if you print anything yet another huge variable is introduced.
=headache!
Pretty much what Andrew says.
You have to calibrate every device from source to final output to fully get the benefits. That also means installing a constant light source where you view your images on screen and via print. To give you an example, if your workstation is near a window and you calibrate in the morning, it’ll be wrong by the afternoon/when you switch the room lights on, as the lighting has changed. Yes you can re-calibrate but I haven’t worked anywhere recently where they do this. A few places has a daylight viewing desk to check their proofs from a chromlin, loads don’t even bother with this.
Most people over time work out what something will look like when you output via decent printer or supplier.
I used to work for a firm that did a online proofing system for sending ads to newspapers and magazines, in concept it was great, but in the field it was too much hassle for the enduser to keep everything in check. So they never calibrated their displays once they worked out what worked.
Also if this your only screen I wouldn’t bother. I’ve got my mac lappy plugged into a Lacie display and have calibrated both and the same image looks different on both, when in theory they should be similar.
thanks guys. thats the way i’d figured thing until he got me thinking again. he had the full works in his studio, balanced light viewing box for prints, shielded screens and a fair degree of light control into his studio. having said that, he showed me some reworked image prints as the originals still hand’t come out quite as desired so the screen to print thing isn’t infalible even with front to back processing.
I usually open a few of my finished images in multiple image programs to get an idea of how much variance i’m going to see, although as you say you have the same issue on the other side with any number of viewing programs, monitors, ambient light levels and print outputs.
guess the prob is that I rarely print, especially colour.
haven’t had complaints from clients for the finished images so far at least. having said that I’m finding it a lot better on my MBP anti glare screen than my old shitty vaio. sent my first property shots across before checking them in another viewer and was alarmed to find them all too dark in the browser compared to Lightroom, and (I felt) I had to resend them which was a bit embarrassing.
is the MBP anti glare screen supposed to be good for colour reproduction?
regarding the dark images, have a read of this - http://photo.net/digital-darkroom-forum/00BGEE - I used to get this a lot as well.
Also i’ve read that if it’s viewed in Firefox images come up dark as well.
Solution, tell them to buy a Mac!!! 
or change your Gamma…
