Two different monitors question

divamum

Howdy all. Due to assorted glitches, equipment deaths and other stuff, I find myself working on TWO new and different setups of late.

I have a laptop with an ATI Radeon card (Dell Studio 15), and a desktop with an LG flatpanel monitor and a Geforce card. Both are decent monitors, easy to look at, clear and bright.

However, as far as I've been able to judge so far, the laptop tends towards low contrast and slightly under-saturated; the LG monitor tends towards saturated colours, high contrast and a bit dark.

I can cope with either, but depending on which machine I'm working on, I have to "compensate" differently.

How can I relate them to each other, and also to "reality" (or at least the printer!). I don't need 100% accuracy, just a ballpark idea so that I can make appropriate pp adjustments based on what I see. Is there a numerical value I can read, or some kind of software app which can read that info and parse it for me, or...?

I suspect I'm heading into the murky world of monitor calibration about which I know NOTHING (and for which I currently have ZERO budget to invest in calibration software or equipment), so let's keep it simply for starters. By all means point me to a thread, tutorial or article which covers this if you know of a link. I just need to know approximately "where" my monitors are for contrast and colour so that I can adjust accordingly.

Thanks in advance!

Newsy

Matching monitor to printer can be tricky. The key is that the monitor is usually too bright as compared to the printer.

Most LCD monitors out of the box have their brightness jacked up so that white luminosity is on the order of 300 cd/m2. You need to get that down between 110 and 130 cd/m2. The standard calibration point most people use as a target is 120cd/m2.

The only way to accurately calibrate is with a hardware calibrator - the Spyder3 and i1 (EyeOne) are the two most often cited. With wide gamut monitors, it would appear that you need the Spyder3 over the Spyder2.


A series of great reads can be found on the Luminous Landscape website:

http://luminous-landscape.com/
- use the search field on the far left column and you'll find dozens of articles for monitor, calibrating, profile, printing

http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/monitor_profiling.shtml
http://www.luminous-landscape.com/tutorials/calibration.shtml


Google "monitor calibration" + "how to" and you are bound to find some interesting sites.
Another great site for eyeballing your calibration is this site:

http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/




In addition to the monitor calibration/profile, you will also need to consider your printer profiles and the software you use to print.

Paper has an enormous influence on the output of the printed image. You have to ensure that your printer is configured to use a specific paper. You can purchase profiles for specific papers or obtain hardware that will permit you to generate your own profile. Sometimes, all that is needed is to ensure you are using the correct profile for the paper as supplied by the printer manufacturer for their brand of paper.

Which leads to printing with software that is profile "aware". Just as we have software that will use the monitor profile for displaying an image on your TFT-LCD monitor, there is software that will use a paper profile. You must ensure that the profile is for your printer and the specific ink and the correct paper.

Adobe CS, PS Elements, Paint Shop Pro, and ACDSee PRO are both monitor and printer profile aware but you have to configure them to the correct profiles. For much of my printing (and I don't do much) I use a program "QImage PRO" which is also monitor and printer profile aware.

FYI... I use a Spyder2 PRO to calibrate my laptop and also my desktop. The laptop's screen is pretty much hopeless, as most laptop's are, and my desktop has a standard gamut Samsung 215TW (S-PVA) and it calibrates reasonably well. Despite both being calibrated they are still not exactly the same in appearance but the print matching is much better.

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divamum

Thanks so much for all that info and the great links! I've been googling like crazy, but was mostly finding links to hardware calibration tools etc. At this point I'm less concerned about printer output than I am about knowing which monitor is "dark" and which is 'bright" so that I can adjust accordingly when I'm making changes to brightness/saturation etc in post - at the moment they're quite different, and I just don't know what to use as a baseline.

Thanks! (and keep those cards and letters coming, folks - any and all info gratefully appreciated!)

colourbox

It's gonna be tricky - even if you do buy calibration equipment. Laptop displays are built under the constraints of light weight, low power consumption, and thinness, so are limited in their color and density range compared to a good desktop monitor. In other words, even if you ran a calibrator on both, the result would be that the calibrator would generate profiles that would make each monitor behave as best they can, and that's the catch. The laptop monitor will likely never generate as dark a black or as red of a red as the desktop monitor no matter what you do. It's like asking me to join a pro football team: You can build up my average physique as far as it will go, and I'll still get steamrolled on the field.

Even the very best laptop displays are usually not as good as middle-of-the-road desktop displays. This article goes into that somewhat. The closest you can come is to calibrate both laptop and desktop and then, over time, get a sense of how far off the laptop monitor is compared to the desktop, kind of the same way that after a while you sort of get to know whether the image on your camera LCD is actually OK or not.

divamum

"get a sense of how far off the laptop monitor is compared to the desktop, kind of the same way that after a while you sort of get to know whether the image on your camera LCD is actually OK or not."

THAT is exactly what I'm trying to do - once I know "ok, everything on this looks a little pale" (or dark, or high contrast or oversaturated or whatever), I will know how much to compensate or not - that's the main goal!