Is calibration must?

[rustyair]

Hi all,

I have an year old imac 21" and have a few questions.

1. Is calibration must ? (I send out digital files to online printers and sometimes the color does not match.)
2. Is imac monitor good enough? or Do I need to get a photography purpose monitor?
3. Is it worth to calibrate an imac monitor?
4. What are my options for calibration? I've heard calibration hardware such as Spiders etc doesn't really work well on glossy imac screen.

Thanks in advance!

[Bruce Watson]

Is calibration a must?

Of course not. You can iterate with prints. You'll get where you want to be eventually, but it usually takes a lot of work prints to get there.

The point of a calibrated and controlled workflow is to gain sufficient WYSIWYG so that you can zero in on what you want from a print quickly and with less time and resources put into work prints. But in my experience I still have to make a couple of work prints.

So calibration is nice, and convenient, and makes for a quicker and less wasteful workflow. But it's not a requirement.

[lenser]

Outstanding question rustyair. I hope you don't mind if I add a further question to it. What is the best way or program to calibrate one monitor or a series of monitors between workstations as work does not match between a retoucher that I use or actually even between his two screens) and my own two home screens?

[Preston]

I don't know if a color-managed workflow is a 'must', but as Bruce says, you'll get closer to your final print more quickly, more easily, and use less resources along the way.

For a time, I was using Vuescan and my Microtek 1800f to scan my 4x5 transparencies. It was not profiled. I found I was getting a magenta cast which was difficult to remove. I found an E-6 IT8 target, and then using that and Vuescan's profiling capability, I found my scans were coming out much better.

I also calibrate and profile my monitor. Again, I usually only have to make a couple of proofs to get things looking the way I want.

My system isn't perfect, but the time and resources saved is a real plus.

It's up to you, really.

--P

[Frank Petronio]

You can have a closed-loop workflow if you control your printer and are not relying on sending your files off to third parties. All it takes is experimentation to find the perfect settings to make a good print, then applying similar settings to all your other future prints.

What profiling your monitor does is it allows you to, in theory, know that what you see as a neutral grey and black/white are going to be close to what third parties are going to be seeing on their monitors -- provided they profile theirs too. And use them in a consistent manner with similar lighting. And have similar monitors with similar color characteristics. And that they keep up with doing regular calibrations because all monitors "drift" over time. Surprisingly, most professionals actually do this, it is industry standard practice.

It also allows you use printer profiles, either canned or custom-built, so that you can proof on screen to approximate the color and "gain" of printing on 2-D, ink sucking, less than purely white paper. And by using printer profiles, you don't have to religiously apply any wacky settings or voodoo as you might with a closed loop system. It's closer to What You See Is What You Get.

However none of this is perfect. It just gets you closer and saves you a bunch of work prints.

You can "calibrate" or create a profile using the free, simple ColorSync utility to do it on screen. If you get actual hardware to do the calibration you'll get a much better profile, more accurate to what you are actually seeing. Many people, especially people who print a lot, know this is worthwhile.

If most of my work was online - just Flickr-Facebook-Forums - then I would just do the basic free calibration and figure every other schmo is about in the same situation. If I had money invested in printers, or did commercial jobs that need to go out to other people (like graphic designers and litho printers), then I'd invest a little more into a calibrator like a Spyder 4 or some of the others I don't know much about.

[Jim Andrada]

I use a Color Munki to profile my dual monitors and my printer and it makes things much easier and faster. The output is very close to what I see on screen. Of course
i still make a couple of adjustments but it is more to optimize the printed result in an artistic sense than to get it "right" in a technical sense. The saving in time and wasted paper and ink definitely pays for the calibration unit.

I've tried the Spyder and I find that the Color Munki is easier and faster particularly for the printer profiling.

[Brian Ellis]

If you're serious about printing - i.e. if you want to make prints of exhibition quality without wasting a lot of time and paper - then calibration is a must. This isn't something that's even debatable IMHO. If you only plan to show your photographs on the web or just make an occasional print to show family and friends then you can get by without calibrating your monitor but why would you want to do that? You can buy respectable monitor calibration software for $100 or so.