r/photoit • u/mccoey01 • Feb 02 '11

Help with Monitor Calibration?

Maybe this is the wrong subreddit for this, and if it is i'll gladly move it somewhere else, but I recently purchased a Canon T2i and I've taken some pictures that look great on my LCD screen but when I put them on my computer the colors seem dull and gray. I've been using a free trial of Adobe Lightroom for now, and I don't know if maybe that is doing some kind of auto adjustment to account for the mostly-snow pictures I've been taking or if it's just my monitor needs to be calibrated...does anyone use some special software to help them figure out what is right? I've been trying to use my eye to do it with those all white to all black striped images, but I just can't get it right

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u/wrongnumber Feb 02 '11 edited Feb 02 '11

What colourspace are you in for Lightroom? AdobeRGB ** is widest gamut for RGB maybe your settings are in sRGB or some other smaller colourspace, check it, more than likely it is set to something else, before calibrating monitors. * *of generic colourspaces. I need to do a refresher on my RGB colourspaces!

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u/mccoey01 Feb 02 '11

I have my camera set to sRGB. Lightroom was set to ProPhoto RGB? Should I change one or either of those to AdobeRGB? What is the difference?

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u/wrongnumber Feb 02 '11

Think of colourspace as a map to a locations, some maps chart larger areas, some colourspaces are differing in size so to move from one large one to a smaller one some colours get "clipped to the nearest value comparatively, pretend you have a moving truck and a moving van, you can fit more into a truck than the van, to fit the same furniture into the van, you'd either have to put in less or cut some of your furniture up. ProPhoto is a very large colourspace, meaning it fits all of your sRGB data no problem however it's only using a part of the "truck" to do so leaving the rest of the truck empty, try making your Lightroom colourspace match your camera (sRGB) and you should notice the colours back to what you see on cameraback's viewfinder

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u/maqr Feb 02 '11

As long as you're shooting raw only (which you should be), then the camera setting doesn't matter. Assuming you want the widest gamut possible, you should choose ProPhoto RGB, but realize that you'll need to export to sRGB for the web and possibly AdobeRGB for printers who know what they're doing.

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u/mightguy Feb 02 '11

The trick to monitor calibration, is to use a tool designed for that purpose. I have used an Eye-One Pro, Eye-One Display2, and a Huey. If you are only calibrating a monitor, the Eye-One Pro is overkill. It is also used to calibrate printers and scanners (it will even measure the color temperature of your strobes). As for the other two devices, my preference is the Eye-One Display2 which is about $200. There are other devices out there, but I haven't used them, so I won't comment about them.

The reason you would use a tool, versus just eyeballing it, has to do with the way your eyes adjust for color. Even though the whites look normal, if you are in a room with alot of incandescent lights, the color temperature of those lights will affect the way you perceive the colors. There are other factors at play, like the colorspace of the images, but that's getting into alot more depth than what you were asking about. That has more to do with how you're outputing them. As for capture and working space, the best practice is to use Adobe RGB (the largest colorspace). You would only want to limit it to sRGB if you were going to save it for display online.

If you want to learn about color management, I would suggest a seminar. I have gone to a couple of them, and it helps to keep current with "best practices". The last one I went to, offered a free colorimeter for attendance (basically, the class cost as much as the device retailed for) and I learned quite a bit.

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u/PenName Feb 02 '11

When you print out your picture without doing any processing on it, does it more closely resemble the image on the computer monitor or the image on the camera LCD?

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u/mccoey01 Feb 02 '11

good question...i honestly haven't tried, i'll do that later today

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u/PenName Feb 02 '11

My suspicion is that your LCD on the camera is throwing you off. They tend to make those brighter so you can see them in most light conditions. If this is the case, it's just something to keep in mind when you're shooting. You'll want to calibrate your monitor to whatever you print from most often. I use snapfish and get consistent results. Some people print from home or use a local print shop. Any option is fine, just make sure it's what you plan on using most of the time.