Don’t Adjust Your Set-Yet

During the summer months when I do the art show tour, a lot of photographers stop by my booth to talk shop. The thing I hear most from the other shooters is, “their prints don’t match what they see on their monitor.” When I ask them if they’ve calibrated their monitors; the overwhelming answer is, “no.”

Now, I understand that spending a couple of hundred dollars on a hockey puck with tentacles isn’t as fun as getting the new lensbaby, but think of the money, as well as the aggravation, you’ll save by not throwing away your money on bad prints. The colorimeter, or spyder, which really is about the size of a hockey puck, sticks to the front of your monitor and measures the color values as well as the brightness of your screen—it takes the guess work out of setting up your monitor.

I’ve worked in the television industry for the past 17 years, so when I had trouble wrapping my head around this whole calibration issue, I thought about it in terms of something I knew best—television— the original digital industry.

Have you ever fallen asleep on the couch only to wake up to those strange-colored vertical bars filling your television screen? These color bars, in a way, are like a colorimeter. They take the guess work out of the set-up for a video technician. The bars are used to properly set-up the videotape, so the show looks the same on every tape machine that it plays on. In theory the idea is the same; create a color neutral work environment.

So, if you’re having trouble with your prints do yourself a favor and calibrate your monitor.  And the next time you wake up on the couch with drool running down your face, and the TV is filled with color bars, you’ll be rest assured that all is calibrated in your world of color.