OSX calibrate 3rd party monitor

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jimmy83

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Ive never got round to calibrating my monitor but really need to since iam getting into photography more and more.

Ive tried with the in-built OSX calibration tool, but wasnt happy with the results. For one, at the start it says turn contrast to max and increase the brightness...but through out the whole process never seems to say to turn it down :thinking:

Anyways, ive jsut switched to Mac to kinda new to it all. Advice would be appreciated :)
 
You don't say what Mac you have , but from experience you'll find that if you go to system prefs and turn the brightness to about 50% that should get you into the right ball court.

I tried the apple method ( which looks like a derivation of Adobe's Gamma ) and found it very clunky and very imprecise ( again like Adobe Gamma).

To accurately calibrate the screen you need something like the Spyder 4 or X-Rite 1I display. They'll set you back about £125-£160. Best option may be to see if you can borrow one initially to see how you get on
 
Chappers said:
You don't say what Mac you have , but from experience you'll find that if you go to system prefs and turn the brightness to about 50% that should get you into the right ball court.

I tried the apple method ( which looks like a derivation of Adobe's Gamma ) and found it very clunky and very imprecise ( again like Adobe Gamma).

To accurately calibrate the screen you need something like the Spyder 4 or X-Rite 1I display. They'll set you back about £125-£160. Best option may be to see if you can borrow one initially to see how you get on
Click to expand...

Yes I forgot to add, ive got a Mac Mini with 3rd party monitors. I dont see an option to turn down the brightness in system prefs.
 
You'll have to make the adjustments on the monitor itself. Unfortunately I can't help with setting the brightness, as I don't know what monitor it is and probably have no experience of it. You could try lowering it to about 75% and see if that helps. Also you may find adjusting the contrast value has a significant effect as well.

It's a long time since I tried to cal monitors without the aid of a calibration tool, and I seem to remember it wasn't easy
 
Chappers said:
You'll have to make the adjustments on the monitor itself. Unfortunately I can't help with setting the brightness, as I don't know what monitor it is and probably have no experience of it. You could try lowering it to about 75% and see if that helps. Also you may find adjusting the contrast value has a significant effect as well.

It's a long time since I tried to cal monitors without the aid of a calibration tool, and I seem to remember it wasn't easy
Click to expand...

No worries, thanks anyway Chappers. It's a DGM 24'' PVA good value at the time quite old now but Iam pretty happy with the picture still.
 
Can anyone help me out with this?
 
Jimmy

Found some old ( very Old ) notes on how we used to set up Dell monitors when we had Windows NT. This OS didn't support colour management so we had to cobble together a way of doing it. Fortunately we had a couple of Mac's where you could, so we used these to produce a reference print.

We would then adjust the contrast to get the brightness about right. ( Yes I know it sounds odd, but contrast had the most significant effect on screen brightness.) We used this to get the screen brightness to match the print. Then used the brightness control to get the contrast about right. . It was a bit fiddly with a fair bit of backwards and forwards adjustment. With the contrast and brightness set we then adjust the Red, Green and Blue gain to get the colour about right. This also meant that sometimes we had to go back and adjust the brightness and contrast as well.

This worked after a fashion, but it really didn't give a good consistent result but for what it was being used for it was OK. Problem was we didn't get any correlation across the brightness range so we had to find amid point and settle on that.

Fortunately Windows 2000 came out fairly soon which supported colour management.
 
daugirdas said:
get colormunki or spyder4, plug it in, install software and it will do the rest for you
Click to expand...

Thanks, you have either of them? I think I might pick up the Spyder-it's just under £100 on Amazon and cheaper second hand.
 
You could consider Pantone Huey Pro, around £60

http://www.wexphotographic.com/buy-...pantone-hueypro_1018316&utm_source=googlebase

I've used one for a few years (an older model than above), firstly on Windows , now on mac (using a third party monitor), and it's a no frills approach to monitor calibration, may not have the bells & buzzers of the more expensive gizmos, but does the job for me.

Works with OS 10.8.2
 
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