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Finally calibrated my monitor!

For a long time, I felt that buying a monitor calibrator was something that I should do, but it wasn’t crucial.  When I made my recent decision to focus more on print photography than on stock, I decided that it was now necessary to get a monitor calibrator.  I decided to go with the Spyder 3 Elite  I felt that right now the ColorVision S3P100 Spyder3 pro would do what I needed, but I wanted to leave room for growth open in the future. I’ll have a more in depth review of the Spyder 3 Elite in the future, though I must say that it took some work to get it running.

When I first installed it I received an error – spyder3.cpp 297 65550 (0×10004).  I am currently running Windows Vista 64 bit and I figured they probably didn’t test against that.  However their web site states that it is compatible, so I downloaded the 3.0.4 version of the software (3.0.1 is in the box) and I still had some problems.  Then I realized that the older version was still running, so I made sure that I was running the new version and the error went away.  I then had problems getting the suction cup to stay but like the software says if you wet the suction cup slightly it sticks much better.  Finally, the software had a hard time recognizing the device.  To fix this, I just unplugged the USB cable and plugged it back in and then it recognized it.

After all that, the monitor calibrator did make a difference with my monitor.  The before and after shots definitely showed and improvement.  More important, I opened a shot that I created before I calibrated my monitor and I fixed it.

The following is a shot of a harvestman I created before.

A number of viewers had mentioned that the shot is too yellow and is a bit overexposed.  Obviously the overexposed part was not affected by monitor calibration, but I suspect the yellow tint was partially because I had previously not calibrated my monitor.  Here is the new shot after a bit of editing.

I think I like the second shot a bit better.  What do you think?

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Tags: calibration, calibrator, colorvision, harvestman, macro, monitor, photography, spyder, spyder3