I got some prints back and the colors are all over the place - B&W ones came back fine, some color ones are right on and some are massively off. I think I need to bite the bullet and buy a monitor calibrator.
Anyone ever use one and/or have any recommendations? I'm assuming that the $50+ to buy one of these is going to be a lot more worthwhile than throwing more money after bad prints and lots of guesswork.
Or I could just stick to black and white, I suppose.
FWIW, ended up with the Spyder3Pro. Not looking forward to retouching all my photos again though, but if it's necessary....
Please don't believe things Ken writes as gospel take them with a HUGE grain of salt...
That said if you care about your colours looking right, especially when printing them from an external supplier, you should be calibrating your displays at least once a month. Personally I calibrate daily as part of my turn on process...
You calibrate your monitor daily? That's just plain silly. If you need to calibrate your monitor this often you need a new monitor, even once a month is too often.
That being said, calibrating your monitor is very important, especially for PC's. Mac's are not too bad, but the default color on a PC is waaaay too blue.
I've been using the Colorvision Spyder for several years and ma very happy with it.
The people who I trust to produce my prints calibrate their systems every 4 hours.
I need to calibrate every day, because I need to be sure it's right. Chances are the differences in the profile is minimal, but these minimal differences can be the difference between a client coming back or not. It takes at most 5 minutes to do and coincides nicely with how long it takes me to boil the kettle...
^^So when you edit your photos for print, you need to download a new profile for their printer every time? That just doesn't make sense.
What are you using to calibrate your monitor? Are you using an external system that you place on your monitor (like the Spyder), or are you using a built in program that automatically calibrates?
I'm using a spyder colorometer with Eizo's own software.
My printers claim to profile twice a day, I believe them. They perform the final colour correction in house, I send them files soft proofed in Adobe RGB space and they then produce prints which match those.
Try turning in a picture of a citibank CEO where the citibank blue isn't EXACTLY the right shade and see how fast they drop you as a vendor. I do agree though that profiling once or twice a month would be fine, it just makes sense as a worklow point for me to do it daily, the same as I clean my sensor before every shoot and backup all of my data daily too....