62 — Monitor — printer calibration — Interview with Joe Brady

Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast #62 fea­tures an intro­duc­tion into mon­i­tor cal­i­bra­tion and pro­fil­ing and printer cal­i­bra­tion and pro­fil­ing by way of an inter­view with Joe Brady of MAC­grou­pUS. Joe clears up many com­mon ques­tions that we have when it comes to mon­i­tor pro­fil­ing and tells us straight up why hard­ware devices that pro­file your mon­i­tor are vastly supe­rior to the pro­fil­ing soft­ware that comes with mon­i­tors. We talk about colour space, ICC pro­files and how (unfor­tu­nately) the aver­age pho­tog­ra­pher is using a bad mon­i­tor and a flawed work­flow to proof their work. The next pod­cast will fea­ture a full review of the col­or­munki and i1XTreme hard­ware pro­fil­ing devices gra­ciously loaned to me by MACgroupUS.

This image is just to illus­trate a point. On the left is an image off of an UNcal­i­brated Eizo Mon­i­tor. On the right is that same image on a mid-range mon­i­tor that I thought was some­what cal­i­brated. Side by side you can see how the Eizo has a greater tonal range and less of a cast. The results are WAY more dra­matic when you see the result­ing prints with your eyes. When you actu­ally cal­i­brate and pro­file the mon­i­tor using qual­ity cal­i­bra­tion hard­ware, you get the best (or close to the best) result that the par­tic­u­lar mon­i­tor can deliver. This usu­ally trans­lates to a wider tonal range with whites being whiter and blacks cast free as well, com­pared to the pre-calibrated monitor.

Links men­tioned in this podcast:

col­or­munki
i1XTREME
col­or­munki train­ing — Videos on using color munki along with color the­ory
Guess what it is thread

Assign­ments on our pho­tog­ra­phy bul­letin board:
March 2009 Photo Assign­ment — Wind
March 2009 — Assign­ment — pho­tograph­ing words — Wind

Thanks as always to Susan, Steven K, Jla­bel, Kent Wil­son and Tony who posted a blog com­ment about our last pod­cast and to all the new mem­bers of the bul­letin board.

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Pod­cast: Play in new win­dow | Down­load