Hello,
I am french, and new here, and studying graphic design. I just switched from a PC to a Mac PowerBook G4 and wonder if I need to calibrate my screen. The whole concept of color management seems quite complex and I hope I can tackle it.
Thanks for the time.
Sindyeli
Salut. We’ll, I haven’t had much luck in getting a decent calbration/charaterization of the Powerbook LCD (see the Calibrating LCD on Powerbook G4 topic). The one I worked with did not appear to be very stable. What I was after was to simply improve the Powerbook LCD to look a little closer to the 23" Apple Cinema Display I was hooking up to it. I don’t think you would actually want to do color critical work on a Powerbook G4 LCD. Moreover, being that you’ll likely be moving it around a lot, your ambient light will be constantly changing, voiding your profile.
Merci Michael! I guess I’ll leave things as such, and maybe get a book on color management. As far as not doing work on this LCD, I have to since it’s my work tool. But I’ll figure things out. In the long run I’ll probably get an Apple Cinema Display but for now that’s it.
Sindyeli and Mike… FYI
I have spent close to $1000 on calibration programs only to find out that my monitor may not be calibrational! I have an17" LCD and the consensus, “after the fact-ex post facto” and $1000, is that unless you are doing professional image editing,printing etc…there is no REAL need to calibrate your monitor over and above the basic user settings. [size=18]But [/size]heh all you “experts” why the heck are you telling everyone in forums, private emails, your websites, “that before anyone attempts to color manage an image, YOU MUST CALIBRATE YOUR MONITOR”?
And it is NOT easy in any way shape or form!!!
Their philosophy is very misleading and very costly!!
It’s true that if you’re not wanting an accurate representation of what the final image will look like, you don’t need to calibrate your monitor. If you are planning to implement any sort of color control, however, the best place to start is at your monitor. If you don’t get a good softproof, you’ll likely be dissapointed with the screen to print comparison, or make corrections that are unnecessary or compromise the quality of the image. Monitor calibration isn’t really very difficult with a good quality monitor. Sounds like you’ve been burned, and I can relate, but I would first look at the monitor rather than bash monitor profiling in general. All LCDs are not made equal.
Oh I agree 100% about quality monitors. My point of contention is that it is NOT the basis of providing support by these “experts”/knowledgeable responders".
There is usually NEVER or very rarely a mention that it might be your monitor. As I stated ,the first thing out of their mouth when addressing a printing problem or color management, color printer profile problem is “YOU MUST CALIBRATE YOUR MONITOR FOR PROPER COLOR MANAGEMENT” THEN I will respond to your question"!!! Then “when you have done this we can get your color problems squared away.”
But when I inform them that I did and still have a terrible profile( I am using Optix XR Pro) they withdraw from the discussion. The Gateway 17" LCD Monitor I have is supposed to be above average with the Radeon9200 card. It does have adjustments but when the Optix profile is used using the suggested standards the monitor looks terrible.
There does not seem to be very much help with LCD’s. Although Chromix is trying to help me.
The ‘experts’ are right when they say you must have an accurately calibrated monitor because it gives you a fixed reference you can use to make judgements about colour.
Unfortunately it’s not much help when the calibration fails. I have found a set of reference prints in both electronic form, with an embedded colour space and in professionally printed form, on photo paper, to be invaluable in judging whether or not my monitor profile is correct.
I bought a SpyderPRO a while ago and although it certainly improved the look of my display I could never get precise colour matching. In Photoshop images had a red cast. I recently installed a Spyder2PRO and now have perfect colour matching. To me this means the design of the SpyderPRO was never very good or mine has always been faulty.