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Calibrating Your Monitor

Lesson 5 from: The Photo Printing Workshop

Alex Strohl

Calibrating Your Monitor

Lesson 5 from: The Photo Printing Workshop

Alex Strohl

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Lesson Info

5. Calibrating Your Monitor

Waste less paper and time by properly calibrating your monitor. Alex takes you step by step on how to do that using the datacolor SpyderX.

Lesson Info

Calibrating Your Monitor

the toolkit. The first place to start when it comes to printing is having a properly calibrated monitor. I know it doesn't sound very fun but it's necessary, especially when you want to match what you see on your screen to the paper on your printer. If you decide not to calibrate your monitor, it's fine to you're just gonna be wasting more ink and paper and it might be a bit more frustrated. So let's get it done now and then we can move on to the fun stuff every couple of months. You should be calibrating your monitor if you're printing. If you're not printing that often, do it every year, that's fine. But I really recommend it every few months. You can use one of these little spider things. This one is called the data color Spider X. Elite. And after playing with a few different ones I've landed on this one and it's been very accurate and easy to use. So if you're just looking for the easy, just get this guy, it's not sponsored in. Anyway. Now I'm gonna show you how I calibrate my ima...

c this one hasn't been calibrated in at least nine months. So it's really time to do it. Let's get into it. Okay, let's get the spider plugged in untangled tangled cable. There you go. So when you plug it in it's gonna tell you to download the software and Alright. Data colors Spider X. Because there's like two different version of, there's two different versions of the software. The Pro and the Elite. Can I make sure you get the Elite straightforward staff, you just install it. Register it okay. Were activated? Yes, yes, we're up and running now. The fun begins. Okay, so can I break my display next. So yeah, you want to make sure your monitors be done for more than half an hour, make sure that there's no crazy light conditions going on. Got a couple lights here for filming but we'll just try to get as dark as it gets okay, still going down my checklist. Yes, my mother is a default. I have it here as the color profile imac haven't done anything custom then he wants you to adjust it at the comfortable brightness somewhere in the middle and then you plug it into the have you plugged in your Spider? Yes, I have. Next. This is a desktop recalibrating. It's a laptop, laptop obviously. Yeah. Make sure that it has the right display manufacturer. Yeah. And the a Mac only has brightness. So next this seems like a trick question but not really. Apple uses the white lead. So we just hit next. Right. And you want to get, make sure you get step by step assistant. Okay. And I want to do a full cow for collaboration of your display. So this I usually leave it recommended. Haven't found any benefit to tinkering with. It seems to place your Spider X. Like this on the desktop. Um he just wants to see how much light is falling onto your monitor here. We have a few lights for filming so it might be tricky, we'll see what happens and next I was doing a little reading so yeah it's telling me that the room light is very high. It was like neons aiming at this thing so we're gonna go with the recommended settings. Okay so this just wants you to hold this thing just open up. Place my little spider here if you need to hold it you just sometimes you have to hold it but here's looking pretty flush. Get next and then magic ensues. W you'll be glad you did it. It's not the most fun thing. It's kind of like buying memory cards for your camera. It's not super exciting. But once you have it you have you have your cards. So here the Spider wants you to adjust the brightness to the target so if I remember correctly you keep going a little more. So we're just shy so we're just shy of this much right here. This wants what it wants you to adjust. So if you give it one or two more we should be good. Let's hit update Updated. Not grow too much one down. It's hard to be within 4%. It's as good as gonna get with this room. But when I do this, when it's like the room is dark ish, I can get to within very close to the green line so I'll try to get within it as best you can with this, We're gonna have to do it like this and we'll have to recalibrate off camera, continue. Hey, well, measuring complete great excitement here. Okay, so now we're done with this. Thank you for your services, data color and then you can give a name to your profile. I just got it calibrated and then The Month 6 22. Do you want to set up a calibration reminder? I don't because I can see when it started to get off calibration but you can do it every couple of times save. Now we're calibrated. Did you see the change there? We've lost a lot of contrast. That's because the room is too bright for proper calibration. I'm gonna recalibrate right now off camera. We'll turn all the lights off. But if you've done this in your normal setup at your house and you've managed to find somewhere a little darker, you should be good to go right now. This is cool. Yeah. So what you've been missing on. So you know if you switch like before and after, especially the earth tones here, I find them quite shocking and the blues too, it's red. Okay, next, so you want to compare to W Rgb yada. Good to go now that the monitor is calibrated, we can move on to the next phase

Ratings and Reviews

user c7bdd5
 

Thank you. Lots of good information. Well done.

Isaac Johnston
 

Through and also to the point! Well worth the watch, and I feel confident to print on my own now.

fbuser 517642fd
 

I would recommend it for anyone trying to understand the print process better but, I think Alex needs to work on speaking a bit clearer and maybe slow down a bit when he is moving his cursor around in LR as was difficult to keep up with him and to see what he was doing.

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