karl shah-jenner wrote:
a few freeware tools for us windows users that may be of help.
These are excellent ideas! But if, for example, you are colour-blind (as
I am), then they are not so useful...
And even fully colour sensitive people disagree - as do my wife and
daughter - over colours on the screen.
And what I want more than anything is to get the printer to produce what
I see on the screen
So I bought ColorPlus (spyder and software combined for automatic
calibration) 3 weeks ago even though prints weren't very far out from
the monitor. But portraits had just a little yellowish tinge and I
couldn't get rid of it without spoiling the rest of the image.
To my surprise there wasn't apparently much wrong with my monitor
setting at first glance. But to my amazement the prints are now
virtually spot on.
There these areas of error...
1 Camera interpreting the colours in the scene (assuming correct
white balance, you can't do much about that)
2 Monitor interpreting the colours in the files.
3 Printer interpreting the colours in the print files.
Obviously step 2 for me was significantly out!
If we spend $1000 on a camera, $180 on a printer, $170 on a scanner, god
know how much on paper and ink, the cost of this monitor calibration
tool ($99) pales into insignficance.
I shall probably save the cost of that purchase within 6 months.
Incidentally, knowing that 8% of all men are colour-blind, I continue to
be amazed that someone hasn't tackled the question of accurate colour
printing for them. I use skin tones as my judge of accuracy (e.g. Hue =
18 - 30 range is pretty useful). But when I read in books "now carefully
tweak the colour balance to remove the slight tinge of...." I give up in
frustration because I can't see the problem in the first place!!!
Howard
P.S. I'm red-green affected, not totally colour blind.
