Monitor Color?

djsilver666666

Last weekend (21 to 22) I was at a soccer tournament taking pictures of the team I am an assistant coach on. I can easily take 200 to 300 pictures a game and my card only holds 487 so I download them to my laptop between games. I was going through them on the way home, and I liked the lighting, color, etc . But when I transferred them to my desktop comp to edit and what-not the pictures seemed a tad over green. This troubles me because if my monitor is off I can't really edit them to look nice, because they will turn out blue-red-ish.
Is their something I can do?

jfriend

You need to calibrate your monitors

djsilver666666 wrote:

Last weekend (21 to 22) I was at a soccer tournament taking pictures of the team I am an assistant coach on. I can easily take 200 to 300 pictures a game and my card only holds 487 so I download them to my laptop between games. I was going through them on the way home, and I liked the lighting, color, etc . But when I transferred them to my desktop comp to edit and what-not the pictures seemed a tad over green. This troubles me because if my monitor is off I can't really edit them to look nice, because they will turn out blue-red-ish.
Is their something I can do?

The solution is to calibrate all your monitors to a known standard. This should make them look the same as each other and allow you to create images with a predicatable look on other calibrated monitors. There are a number of software/hardware products that can be used to calibrate monitors. Note: to really do it right, you need a hardware-based device that can accurately measure the output of your monitor and then instruct the software how to calibrate your monitor to match a standard.

I personally use Gretagmacbeth Eye-One. Others that also seem to work are Spyder2Pro and Monaco OptixXR Pro.

djsilver666666

Wow, those are all more than $200 dollars. I don't quite have that kind of money to spend on calibration, besides I would only use it once. Do you think a camera shop might have a calibrator I could rent or something?

jfriend

djsilver666666 wrote:

Wow, those are all more than $200 dollars. I don't quite have that kind of money to spend on calibration, besides I would only use it once. Do you think a camera shop might have a calibrator I could rent or something?

The problem is that you need a hardware-based solution to really do it right so, you are right, they are all in the $200+ range.

Proper calibration is done more than just once because it can drift over time. I doubt you can rent it because I suspect the licensing doesn't really allow for that. A better bet would be to see if there's someone in your local area (perhaps some at a local photo club) that you can borrow one from, but you should still make sure that type of use is permitted under the license.

There are some non-hardware choices out there like Adobe Gamma (comes bundled with most Adobe Photo-related products) which are probably better than nothing, but I didn't find they really solved my problem when I tried them. You could start with something like that.

djsilver666666

I don't know of any local photo clubs, anybody know one near USA, NC, Chapel Hill?

I do know some friends that are more "professional" oriented than me, I'll call them. And maybe I can try a software calibrator, although I know you are correct that they cannot do as a good job as hardware. Software can't accommodate for lighting, etc.

digismile

As mentioned by John, I would at least use Adobe Gamma (if you use Photoshop, it should be on the CD).

If you want something on a bit more of a budget, check out Huey or Huey Pro from Pantone. It's $80 from B&H. There are a number of users here on dgrin that can give feedback.

The other thing that you can always do, even without profiling your monitor is to do color adjustments "by the numbers". Google it, and you will find lots about how you can use Photoshop to correctly adjust color, simply using neutrals as your guide (Dan Margulis, Katrin Eismann, etc.). It would also certainly tell which one of your monitors has the most significant color shift

Regards,

CatOne

A Huey will do an adequate job, and is more in the $85 range. There have been reviews by Andy right here on DGrin -- have a search.

It's really pretty much mandatory if you care about color, to use a hardware calibrator. Otherwise it's total guesswork -- and if you care about color you need to calibrate. That really is the only option.

You could try to find a friend with a calibrator and "borrow" it to create a profile -- but you'd need to read the license agreements to see if this is actually okay per their license.