Colour calibration?

[garethace]

ColorVision SpyderPRO with OptiCAL Review date:

 

 

When you think about it, it's amazing that colour computer prints look anything like the original image on the screen.

 

The screen image is being created by a matrix of tiny red, green and blue splodges, which each emit light of varying brightness depending on the signal from their electron beam or thin film transistor (for CRT and LCD monitors, respectively).

 

The print, in contrast, is made up of at least four inks - cyan, magenta, yellow and black, with lighter versions of some of the colours added for finer control in true "photo quality" printers. The ink doesn't emit any light of its own, of course; all it does is reflect some portion of the light that hits it.

 

There are lots of different colour printer types, from domestic inkjets through high-output colour lasers to big commercial proofing machines, but all of them lay down some kind of coloured substance on the material on which they print, and that coloured substance is always fundamentally different in nature to the glowing splodges you were looking at before.

 

To make a screen image look like a print, regardless of what screen and what printer you use, you need colour calibration. Somebody, somewhere, needs to empirically measure what each printer and monitor does when it's told to print or display each shade of each colour. From those measurements, you can create a "profile" for each device (a widely-used standard for which has been created by the International Color Consortium) that compensates for its oddities. Similarly, profiles can be created for film viewed on a particular lightbox, slide projectors, and so on - but we're talking about digital, here. Get with the times.

 

 

 

http://www.dansdata.com/spyder.htm