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Home >> Photography >> Digital Photography ColorVision
Spyder2PRO Studio
At the most basic level, a color managed workflow can be a close looped system that has the editor attempt to match a print to what they see on the monitor and then doing manual adjustments until they get it right. As you can imagine, a whole lot of printing and tweaking to get it right, something that doesn’t sit too well with me. What really needs to be established is for the hardware to be calibrated and profiled as the basis on which to build a color managed workflow. Monitor calibration and profiling is that basis to build on. While there are cheap ways of doing some kind of monitor profiling, such as Adobe Gamma Loader, this is just way too subjective to be of any critical value. As your eyes go, so goes your profile, and everyone is going to see differently from each other, so that middle gray to one might be too warm or too cool to another. A hardware device called a colorimeter along with good profiling software takes the subjectivity out of the equation and allows us to profile a monitor with great accuracy. Today, there are a handful of manufacturers producing colorimeters and companion software to profile monitors. For a long time though, only one brand has made an effort to bring color management to the masses while other brands marketed to the professional graphic artist, pro photographer, and printing industry, meaning big bucks to buy into the GretagMacbeth and Monaco/X-Rite products. ColorVision has been adding to their product line over the years and reducing prices on their mainstay Spyder colorimeter and PhotoCal/OptiCal software bundles, as the other big names in color management began offering lower cost products. I bought a ColorVision Spyder and OptiCal primarily because they had a decent reputation for quality monitor profiling and also because their prices were more affordable than other products. At the time of purchase, I went with a CRT-only spyder, as I did not foresee a time when I would want to calibrate a LCD monitor. My how times change and in the short time that I’ve owned the old spyder and OptiCal, I have now come to desire a good LCD for photo editing. Plus, I also have a Toshiba notebook that would be great for mobile editing if only I could profile it and trust the colors I see on screen. With those thoughts in mind along with the question of just how good is a LCD for critical photo editing, I was quite happy to receive a review sample of the new ColorVision Spyder2PRO Studio package.
The new Sypder 2 is quite attractive with its contrasting grey and back colors. It’s a two-piece design that has the basic colorimeter attaching to a CRT by way of suction cups, same as the old spyder, along with another piece that attaches to the underside of the spyder to prevent the sunction cups from touching a LCD. Buffer pads help to keep your LCD screen pristine. A good sized weight is attached to the captive USB cord to act as a counter balance when profiling a LCD. This counterweight is very important because it keeps the spyder in place as it rests on top of the LCD. The weight can be moved up and down the cord as needed for your particular LCD.
Software installation was a breeze and while I installed DoctorPRO and Pantone Colorist, I will not be commenting on these products this time around, as the greater interest is in monitor calibration and profiling. The new SpyderPRO software is quite different in look and feel compared to the relatively utilitarian OptiCal. The new software is now wizard based and prompts you each step of the way. While OptiCal was certainly straightforward and simple to use for basic profiling, the new software will be more inviting for newcomers to the color management process. There are help screens available right up to the actual calibration process by the spyder that will explain what some of the concepts and settings are for. All in all, it looks really slick and indicates a maturation of ColorVision’s approach to monitor calibration. Before getting into the comparison results from the calibration of my various monitors on hand, I’ll go over some basics of the SpyderPRO calibration process.
The next prompt, not seen here, the Wizard will ask what kind of luminance controls your monitor has for brightness and contrast, select the appropriate choice, which for this example is for both brightness and contrast controls.
In my sample here, you can see that I've hit all three bars bang on and my current figure matches the target figure. My Kelvin range is not quite at the target of 6000K, but it's pretty darn close. The Luminance target is interesting because in the old OptiCal process, it was recommended that I hit between 85-95, but here, I'm just below 82. As I recall from the old process, I had to really spike up my red gun output to try and hit the recommended target. The measurement stage takes a while, about 15 minutes, as the spyder now measures from near black to bright red, near black to bright green, and near black to bright blue, and then through grey tones, whereas the old process only measured strictly in the visible red, green and blue tones. At the end of the process, you're prompted to either accept the name given for the new profile, or rename it before it gets saved and is applied by the computer. Before quitting the calibration process, you are given the chance to see a before and after view of the monitor. Below are photos of the before (left) and after (right) from my Toshiba notebook. You can clearly see a very blue bias in the before image.
The next time you boot up your computer, you'll see a ColorVision window pop up during start-up to confirm that the new profile has been properly loaded. It's also quite visible as you'll see the native blue biased tone suddenly become neutral. About the only quirk I came across with the Spyder2PRO was with this start-up screen on my main desktop. The image would hang and stay on the desktop because of other start-up processes my computer goes through, such as a DVD recorder recognition process, as well as a hard drive monitor. I used the Windows Task Manager to end the application to get rid of the hung screens. This did not remove or affect the loaded profile. There were no such issues with my other desktop or notebook, which also has the hard drive monitor, but not the DVD recorder recognition process.
My Digital Darkroom and Testing Methodology
My current reference system (reference meaning point of comparison, not as the ultimate state of the art) of a Sony 21-inch Trinitron CRT for main image editing and a Dell 19-inch Trinitron CRT for palettes and toolbars. Incidentally, that's my photographer friend Larry Rotta and his assistant Giselle on screen.
Here is one image enlarged and dragged from the calibrated 21-inch CRT into the un-calibrated 19-inch CRT. Note the big difference in color cast from the warmth seen at left to the cold blue at right. Can the ColorVision package remedy this discrepancy? Answer below... My MO was to keep my primary 21-inch Sony CRT calibrated and profiled with the old Spyder and OptiCal as reference to compare how the new Spyder 2 and software fared. The testing room was my home office dedicated to my computer, photo gear, books, slides and assorted junk that I have store in it to keep away from the kids. My normal editing regimen is to have a desk lamp with a daylight balanced bulb, turned on, but pointing at a back wall to provide some ambient light. The normal room light is off, making for low light levels. When I want to compare a print to the image on screen, I pull the desk lamp's head down for viewing the print. I make sure the desk lamp is not hitting the screen. I calibrated all the monitors with this desklamp on but with no light reaching the monitors.
The three computers and four monitors were:
The four monitors had these control settings available:
It’s a good mix of CRT and LCD with some offering full controls and some not. I found the results quite intriguing. I was especially curious as to how well the new Spyder 2 and Spyder2PRO software would fare with my Toshiba notebook and how accurate the profiling would be without direct user intervention to adjust brightness, contrast and RGB values. I always knew the notebook LCD was far too blue to be of any use for serious image editing, but left it alone until I had a LCD capable colorimeter. Although I could tweak the RGB values via a curves control from the nVidia driver, what would be the point of adjusting blindly? For three of the monitors, I followed the ColorVision wizard recommendation to leave various settings at their factory defaults and allow the Spyder and software to come up with a profile. In each case, what ColorVision produced was a definite improvement over the original state of the un-calibrated monitor was at before, but not an ideal match to the reference CRT or to the test prints. The exception was the 21-inch Sony that I only calibrated and profiled once and was satisfied with the results. I went with the usual white balance of 6500K and a gamma of 2.2, which turns out to be the sRGB standard that HP and Microsoft came up with some time ago as a reference for what the average PC monitor displays. I’m kind of confused about sRGB being the average of the typical PC monitor, as most monitors are set to a white balance of 9300K with most users never changing this default setting, which yields way too high blue bias. Brightness and contrast are also usually set too high, which I think is the indicative of the TV sales approach. Spike up the settings to lewd and crude levels to catch a prospective buyer’s eyes on the TV showroom with dozens of competitive models all turned on. Looking at the desktop background with a supposed middle grey color results in an obvious blue/magenta color cast with a brightness that almost hurts the eyes when viewing high contrast images, or simple black text on white background in a word processor application. Let’s see what the Spyder 2 can do to amerliorate these issues. The Results Acer 15-inch LCD - I calibrated and profiled this one the most, trying many combinations of white balance and gamma settings, but ultimately, I settled on a white balance of 6000K and a gamma of 2.2. Following the recommendations with the usual standard of 6500K and 2.2 gamma, resulted in a profile that was too blue and way too bright, even though the LCD had been reset to factory defaults with brightness and contrast levels at 50%. The first ColorVision profile was still a major improvement over the un-calibrated state of the Acer and it led me to believe that I could yet make the Acer worthy of a digital darkroom. Next up, I ignored the ColorVision recommendation to leave the monitor at factory defaults and went ahead and tweaked the contrast and brightness. This brings in a subjective component to the calibration process because everybody will see things differently and for this particular Acer 15-inch LCD, I could tweak the brightness and contrast to their extremes and I would have still been in accordance to what the ColorVision wizard recommended as appropriate. That is I could still make out four separate white bars for the contrast setting, even with the contrast spiked to 100% and I could still make out four distinctive black bars for the brightness setting even at 0%. In fact, I ended up with a brightness level at 0% to keep the brightness of this LCD tamed enough to compare with the reference CRT and test prints. Whoa, 0% dude! I left the contrast at factory default thinking that even though I could still see four bars at 100%, it was probably not for the best. Once the brightness was set appropriately, I set about getting a better match for the white balance. While 6500K was too blue going with 5500K was a touch too warm, so I input my own figure of 6000K and was happier for it. With these settings, I felt that this little Acer could indeed do some good work in a digital darkroom. I do admit that some shadow detail suffers as a consequence of trying to get the brightness down to an appropriate level, but tweaking it up a notch or two can help without doing damage to the profile. Although ColorVision does recommend calibrating and profiling whenever a parameter has changed on the monitor. Toshiba 17-inch LCD - This would be the most interesting monitor to profile. While the Toshiba LCD can be adjusted via software and I anticipated being able to do so, as it turned out, once you reach the actual calibration screens in the ColorVision software, it takes over the whole screen and background windows are not longer visible or accessible. I figured that I could probably have tweaked the Toshiba LCD incrementally for each RGB value and then start Spyder2PRO all over again to see where it stood for the RGB values, but it would have taken so long and become so tedious that it would have made me never want to profile again. To paraphrase an insider trading jailbird, this would not be a good thing. Thus, I indicated to the ColorVision wizard that my LCD had no brightness, contrast, backlit, RGB, white balance presets, or Kelvin sliders. Zip, nada, zilch. The only thing I could stipulate was what my end white balance and gamma settings should be. How would the ColorVision Spyder and software fare with such minimal input from the user? Could the LCD really be calibrated to a level that one could trust it for digital darkroom editing? The results using the fairly standard 6500K white balance and a gamma of 2.2 was a definite improvement over the previous non-profiled state, but as with the Acer, it was still too blue when compared to the reference CRT. I profiled again, but went with 5500K and the same 2.2 gamma. Better, but still a touch too warm overall and as with the Acer, I settled on 6000K and a gamma of 2.2 The resulting final profile was in a word, excellent, in how well it matched up to the Acer and to the test prints. There were some minor differences in how the middle gray background in the Windows desktop and the light grey background in Photoshop were rendered, but when viewing the PDI Test Image, I have to say that the image was pretty much the same on the Toshiba LCD as on the Acer LCD. Whoa, awesome dude! Notice a trend here? LCDs too blue in general and need to be warmed up modestly in white balance compared to a CRT. Some LCDs need to have their brightness settings set significantly downwards in order to provide a more accurate reflection of what the end print will be like. Otherwise, what will look like fairly accurate colors, will be too washed out for critical editing comparisons. I had expected to need to go into the nVidia driver and tone down the brightness of the Toshiba LCD, but I had no need to do anything in the driver software. The ColorVision product produced a great profile once I got a handle on matching the white balance/warmth of the reference print and CRT. Dell 991 Trinitron CRT - This old Dell, circa 2000 manufacture, would be another challenge because my assumptions about calibrating and profiling a monitor based on the old ColorVision OptiCal, was that a monitor needed RGB settings for best accuracy. This assumption should have already been tossed into the garbage after the Toshiba experience, but CRTs are different aren't they? In the OptiCal software, there is a PreCal sequence where one adjusts individual red, green, and blue color gun values to a reference level set by the software. Hit this target and your resulting profile will be very good. Miss out on this PreCal stage and the resulting profile is not so good. In the new ColorVision software there is no PreCal, everything is coordinated into a one-step process, but there is still the ability to adjust RGB values, depending on what your monitor offers. The old Dell offers brightness, contrast and some pre-set white balance settings, but with no access to individual RGB values. The profiling of the Dell CRT was very interesting in that I also had to select a white balance of 6000K with a gamma of 2.2 for it to match up to the reference and the LCDs. Very surprisingly, I had to tone down the brightness considerably on the Dell compared to what I normally set for the reference CRT, just as I had to do with the Acer LCD. Whoa, like this is a five-year old CRT that I picked up used from work and it still had to be dialed way down for brightness, incredible and awesome deal for the $50 I paid for it. As CRTs age, you normally lose brightness and once you can no longer dial in any brightness value to calibrate properly, the CRT is done for as a critical editing tool. The experience with the Dell was further confirmation that the new Spyder and software are capable of producing great profiles for older monitors, or those that are limited in terms of settings available. Remarkable! Sony E540 21-inch CRT - As I profiled the two LCDs and Dell CRT some subtle differences were emerging comparing the profile created with the old OptiCal and spyder versus the new products. The reference CRT was set to a white balance of 6500K and gamma of 2.2 with the old OptiCal. As I progressed along, I noticed a slight warmth in this reference CRT and when I finally came to calibrate and profile the Sony with the new ColorVision products, the resulting profile seemed more neutral than what I had before and a better match for the test prints. We’re talking about subtleties here, so don’t think that these are massive differences I’m describing, because the old ColorVison profile was already pretty good, but there is a sense that middle grey is indeed middle grey and the Gretag Color Checker in the PDI image matched up better than before. After profiling the Sony last and then having two other calibrated monitors on the same desktop, it was very gratifying to have all three presenting me with more or less the same image. For the first time, I would not have cared which computer/monitor combination was used to edit an image, knowing that what I would see on the monitor would translate into an accurate wysiwyg print. For sure there are some very minor differences, such as the aforementioned different background greys seen, but what matters is how well the test image fared and it fared very well no matter which monitor I viewed it on.
Liquid Crystal Displays (LCD) The age
of the cathode ray tube (CRT) is coming to an end. Various makers of
CRT monitors are no longer producing the low cost types in their primary
factories and if they still sell them, have outsourced them to low cost
factories in the developing world. Only the very high-end CRT models
may still be produced in the frontline factories of
Just as digital is pushing film to the margins of photography, so too are LCDs doing the same to the CRT in the computing world. At my workplace, while I still work with a 21-inch CRT, other staff having their computers replaced are now being given 17-inch LCDs. No more CRTs are being purchased by my mid-sized government agency. Our training room now has small profile desktop computers with 15-inch LCDs. There will soon be a time when no staff will be using a CRT unless specifically required, such as one of our video editing staff using a dual-monitor set-up. LCDs have certain benefits over the CRT:
However, there are also some downsides:
There are many photographers that work in the digital darkroom who will not contemplate a LCD for critical use because they do not believe LCD technology is where it needs to be to replace a good CRT. Conversely, there are more and more digital photographers who swear by their LCDs, even of ones that some would not think of as being high fidelity. So which is it? Are LCDs ready for digital darkroom primetime use? My own opinion was that as long as the LCD offered good color quality and had the typical brightness, contrast and RGB controls that a good CRT would, there shouldn’t be a reason why an LCD could not make for a good digital darkroom monitor. I had only limited experience in the past in calibrating a LCD and what I saw was a good promise but something about the manner in which the LCD displayed the image threw me off and at that time, I did not know enough about LCDs to understand what was disconcerting to me at the time. After reading some other articles and through my own experience with the new ColorVision Spyder 2 and software, I now realize that LCDs just run too bright when used out of the box. Reduce the brightness, calibrate and profile and a LCD may just surprise at how well it can do as a serious digital darkroom monitor. I believe LCDs are ready for primetime use, but require a tool such as the ColorVision Spyder 2 and software to get you to that point. Conclusion I think the new ColorVision Spyder 2 and SpyderPRO software are tools that will help a person get a great start in a color managed environment. The package can handle CRT and LCD monitors with aplomb provided that you work with a reference test image to ensure consistency of results, as I did. I know I did the testing somewhat differently, but I had the advantage of already having good printer profiles to use with my printer, so it made it an easier task to see how well the monitor calibration and profiling would fare with the test prints and image on screen. For those without benefit of a good printer profile to print reference images with, well, understand that monitor calibration and profiling is just the first step towards a good color managed system. Good printer profiles is the next step towards the Holy Grail of your prints matching what you see on the monitor. For my system, if I had printed using the old Epson profiles for the 1270, I'd have torn my hair out wondering why there was no match. The old Epson profiles aren't worth a single sheet of cheapo Heavyweight Matte paper. The PDI Test Image is included with the ColorVision package and is a great reference to use with your testing. Print it out with a good printer profile and see how it compares to your calibrated monitor. As I discovered, every monitor is different in terms how it will render an image and its colors and while one monitor needed nothing more than a single calibration to match the test print, others required a bit of tweaking, all of which were easy enough to do with the Spyder 2 and Spyder2PRO software. I had two Trinitron CRTs and two LCDs and while the CRTs would seem similar enough, both being Sony originated products, they required different profiling methods to get the best out of them due to the level of controls each offered. Same with the LCDs, one offered all the controls I’d want to ensure proper profiling while the other did not and to my great satisfaction, the ColorVision package gave great results with both LCDs and ensured consistency despite the different methods used.
ColorVision
offers great quality at prices that are still imminently affordable
for the majority of digital photographers. The Spyder2PRO Studio is
US $299, but as of this writing, a $30 rebate is available from ColorVision
that drops the price down to US $269. This price is competitive with
products from GretagMacbeth and
All in all, the ColorVision Spyder2PRO Studio is worth serious consideration by anyone wanting to calibrate and profile their monitor to a high standard. Recommended! Link to ColorVision December 28, 2005 - In previous What's New postings, I mentioned that I've had a rather vexatious time trying to figure out why my monitor profiles would suddenly disappear after working without problems for so long. I've finally resolved the issue, no thanks to ATI, the video card brand I use in my desktop PC. Problems began shortly after updating the ATI driver to the latest version. Everything seemed good for a little while and then all of a sudden I noticed that right after the ColorVision profiles were loaded, they disappeared. I was checking my Startup programs, somehow thinking that the issue was with a computer maintenance program I installed. But, it was actually an executable file that the ATI driver installs and has loaded at boot-up, but is not listed in the Startup files. I finally found the answer when I was cruising the ColorVision website for an answer. The ATI cards are such an issue that ColorVision has a specific FAQ for profiles that do not seem to work with this brand of graphics cards. This next section is for those using ATI graphics cards and perhaps suffering from disappearing monitor profiles. 1 - Access msconfig using Windows Run from the Start menu:
2 - Click on the Startup tab of the System Configuration Utility window and look down the list for "cli" and then uncheck the box, as seen below. Reboot the system as instructed and accept that you've changed the system configuration and that you're using a custom startup process.
3 - If you happened to have installed the ATI Catalyst Control Center - don't use it! As soon as you open up this ATI application your profiles get dumped. However, there is one setting that you may want to uncheck and then never access the Control Center again. Click on the VPU Recover option and then uncheck the "Enable VPU Recover." You'll notice your profile reappearing again after unchecking it; however, if you run a dual-monitor system, your profile for the second monitor won't appear until you reboot again. Despite all this, I still like ATI cards and I can't recall ever using a different brand over the past decade of computer use and purchasing. I like that my 9800 Pro is a dual-head card that can handle dual-monitor profiling, but down the road, I may look into installing two separate graphics cards to keep things separate and avoid issues - and maybe even consider running three monitors. But, this will likely not happen until I'm ready to buy that 64-bit dual-processor, dual-core AMD Opteron system loaded with 16 GB of RAM and a terabyte of internal storage 8^))
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Correspondence & About this website Copyright © 1998-2008 Edwin Leong |
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It
is now conventional wisdom that photographers working in the digital
darkroom need to have a color managed workflow to ensure that what
they see and edit on the monitor translates to accurate renditions
on print.
The
Spyder2PRO Studio comes with the following:
To
the left is the brightness and contrast settings that should show
four distinctive bars each. The middle is the window that will sequence
through the RGB range of colors, as well as grey scale tones for the
Spyder 2 to measure. The top right shows what use to be the PreCal
stage in the old OptiCal software and below that is a great new feature
to show a history of all the different settings you tried before finally
hitting the target figure necessary to move on in the calibration
process. You want to hit all three RGB bars at the same level for
a proper calibration.
I
used a reference image, the PDI Test Image, seen here, for all the comparisons.
I used old prints of this test image along with fresh new prints for
the comparisons. The rationale for using one test image is that this
is a known quantity and this same test image printed, using the same
printer profile, will produce the same quality print on the same printer
no matter which computer is used in the process. To ensure that I was
correct with my assumption, I did print out the PDI Test Image four
times with three computers and yes, all were identical. I have full
confidence in the custom printer profile I created with the GretagMacbeth
Eye One Photo that was used to print the PDI Test Image on Epson Photo
Glossy paper.
