Spyder2pro manual

The Spyder2 sensor is pretty well-shielded against ambient light, but it's still a good idea to dim the room lights, and make sure there's not bright light from an adjacent window splashing on the screen near the sensor. This presents soft felt pads to the face of the LCD, rather than suction cups, and the filter helps the sensor measure the colors from LCD panels more accurately. There's not a lot to note here, but it does illustrate in passing one of the few limitations we found in the Spyder's software.

Unlike some competing systems, the Spyder2PRO always places the calibration window in the center of the display being calibrated.

This might seem to make sense, since you're likely to be most concerned about color rendering in the center of the display if there happens to be any non-uniformity across the screen face , but we found it annoying when working with monitors that had on-screen menus for making contrast, brightness, and color adjustments.

With some monitors, the on-screen menus would overlay the calibration window, interfering with the measurements. When this happened, some steps of the process required us to move the Spyder, bring up the on-screen menu, adjust the relevant control setting, dismiss the menu, and then reposition the Spyder, for every adjustment. This made the calibration cycle take longer than it might have, were we able to just shift the calibration window an inch or two one way or the other, to avoid the monitor's menus.

In fairness, this really was only an issue on the initial calibration of s monitor, since the monitor's controls generally don't have to be twiddled for weekly recalibration checks. It's still an annoyance that we'd like to see ColorVision fix in future versions of the Spyder's software though. And yes, even LCDs need to be warmed up.

The backlights on many units shift color balance slightly as the warm up, and the contrast characteristics of the liquid crystals themselves also change somewhat with temperature. It should go without saying, but you should also check to make sure that your monitor is in full or bit color mode. Some lower-end calibrators can only handle single monitor per computer, the one carrying the menu bar on a Mac, or the one with the Start menu on it in Windows.

No such worries with the Spyder2PRO. Note though, that under Windows, you must have a separate video card for each monitor you want to calibrate. While they support multiple monitors, dual-head video cards generally won't let you associate a separate profile with each monitor. It will also show whether you performed a Grey Balanced calibration or not, and whether you have the Ambient Light Compensation enabled.

More on these later as well. You can choose whether to continue with the previous settings, or to change them first. For the sake of illustration here though, we'll suppose that we want to change the settings, so we can step through all the option screens.

This screen is where you tell the software what type of display you're working with. Note that calibrating LCDs is one area that really separates the different calibration systems from each other. Thanks to years of standardization, the phosphor colors used in CRT monitors are quite consistent from manufacturer to manufacturer. There are a small number of different "standard" phosphor sets used, but within a given phosphor type, the color spectra tend to be very consistent.

For whatever reason, the color sets of LCDs were never standardized to the same degree. This means that accurate color calibration of LCDs requires much more detailed measurements of the color spectra of the red, green, and blue pixels.

Low-end calibrators have only three sensors red, green, and blue , and so are less able to measure and characterize subtle color differences between different LCD panels. The Spyder2PRO uses a 7-channel "spectrocolorimeter" that measures display performance in seven different color bands.

This greatly improves its accuracy when calibrating LCD displays. The Grey Balanced Calibration checkbox is really only relevant for calibrating projectors, as some projectors will yield better results if you have this turned off.

For LCDs and CRTs though, you'll definitely want this enabled to provide the most accurate and color-neutral greyscale. A number of presets are available, but if you're like the vast majority of users, the "2. These are the gamma and white point values for the sRGB color standard. Real expert users can elect to create their own target setup, varying the gamma, tone curve you can even edit the tone curves manually for each color channel, which might be helpful in matching the display to the characteristics of a non-color-managed photographic output device , white point in either degrees Kelvin or actual CIE color coordinates , enable ambient light compensation, select luminance modes measured or visual and plug in specific values for white and black luminance if you're using measured mode.

Since we're going to be calibrating to a white point of Kelvin a pretty good approximation of mid-day sunlight , you'll want to check and see if your monitor has any controls that might affect white point. Many monitors have a range of preset white point options available in their menus. If this is the case with your display, look for a setting that says Kelvin, as that'll at least get the monitor somewhere close to where you want it to end up.

With smaller changes for the calibrator to make, you'll be that much more likely to get nice, smooth tonal rendition from the calibrated monitor. The idea is to have the Spyder's sensor look at the ambient light in the room, after which the software will make recommendations for how to change your target settings so the display will look right to your eyes, given all the light bouncing around the room.

I guess that's OK if you have no options available for controlling the light levels in your work area, but if you're doing critical color work, it's crazy not to try to control the ambient lighting.

Ideally, you want lighting that's on the dim side of normal relative to typical office illumination, and that approximates the Kelvin of your monitor screen.

That will help you see the full tonal range of the images, and avoid having your color perception skewed by an overall color cast in the room lighting. My strong advice is to leave the Ambient Light Compensation option disabled, and to just make sure that you have a reasonable light level in your workplace.

If you're concerned about matching multiple monitors to each other, you'll want to use Measured, as it lets you set the black and white brightness levels of all your displays to the same values. If you're just working with a single screen, select Visual, as this will let you crank up the brightness of your display to whatever it's capable of or whatever is reasonable for your working environment, see the sidebar above right.

I have three different monitors on my computer, so I'll be selecting Measured mode here. If you're matching multiple monitors, this is where you'd plug in the white and black luminance values you're aiming for. In this case, we'll leave them blank, since I'm not going to actually go into the details of multiple-monitor matching in this overview.

We're now ready to perform the calibration, so I've selected "Continue with these settings. My Apple Cinema Display has no brightness or contrast adjustments, only an overall brightness control that adjusts the backlight -- so I've only clicked on the "Backlight" checkbox.

My Cinema Display tends to wash out the brightest highlights, regardless of the backlight setting, so there are only three distinct white levels visible on it at this stage anyway. I therefore just set the brightness to a level that's comfortable for my office environment.

Actually, I set it to a level that's comfortable, but that also can be matched by the old CRT that's the middle of my three displays. If we were actually going through the full multi-monitor calibration workflow, this would just be a coarse adjustment that would be refined later through actual measurements by the Spyder2. If you're not matching specific luminance levels with other displays though, this is the last point at which you'll actually adjust the luminance.

If I'd told the Spyder2PRO software that I was calibrating a display with separate contrast, brightness, and backlight adjustments, this step might involve manipulating one or more of those controls as well. If the display had a contrast control, we'd see the same screen as above, only with the directive to adjust the contrast as appropriate.

If the display had a separate brightness control, we'd get a second screen showing a series of very dark blocks, with the instruction to adjust the brightness level until we could just make out all four blocks. It's important to note that ColorVision recommends leaving your display's controls at the manufacturer's default settings unless you need to correct an obvious problem. I've found this doubly true with LCD panels: At least with lower-end screens, if I fiddle too much with the controls at this stage of the calibration process, the display can end up operating so far from its nominal condition that it can be very hard to establish a good calibration for it.

Here again, my Cinema Display has none of the options listed. As just noted though, I recommend a conservative approach in twiddling the settings on LCD monitors, as that's often a recipe for failure, or at least difficulty. This isn't the case with CRTs though. This is a spacer that lifts the Spyder's suction cups off the display surface, substituting instead a set of three flat pads and a ring coated with a felt-like covering. This avoids the suction cups leaving marks on the LCD's surface.

The LCD baffle also inserts a pale blue-green filter between the sensor and display surface that helps the Spyder evaluate the color spectra of LCDs more accurately. Counterweight for use with LCD screens Since suction cups won't work on most LCD screens, the Spyder2 needs some other means of holding the sensor at the right position on the screen. Like a number of other calibrators, the Spyder2 comes with a small counterweight attached to its cable. On the Spyder, this weight is permanently attached, surrounding the cable, and slides up and down with moderate force.

I'd strongly recommend grabbing the cable next to the weight when you're sliding it, so as to not put excess force on the cable's attachment to the sensor puck or USB connector. I liked this arrangement better than ones where the weight can be removed, as I found those harder to slide without pulling the weight loose.

This way, the weight will never get lost, either. Alright, we're ready to calibrate! As noted above, if you're calibrating an LCD, make sure the LCD filter is attached to the sensor head, drape the weight down the back of the screen, and position the sensor head on the screen where indicated. It is very useful. For the next screen, which I need not show, I had a choice whether to have the Spyder2 measure ambient light.

If I chose yes, then later in the process, it would measure the light in the room and adjust the profile accordingly. The next screen asked me how to select the desired Luminance Mode: Measured or Visual.

In the process, I, also, elected to have Gray Balanced Calibration turned on. The finished screen, before the actual measuring was to take place, looked like the screen below. Once everything was in place, you leave the Spyder2 alone and various colors will appear on the screen. After you remove the meter, the before and after screen, as pictured above, will appear and you can see the difference for yourself. There are other tools you can use.

There is a curve for analyzing color channel by channel and an Information window which allows the user to review information about the calibration and profile. There is also a Colorimeter window for reviewing the color performance of monitors.

Below is a screen capture of the Information window after the monitor was calibrated. Lastly, one does not have to use only presets, one can create a target profile starting with a tonal response curve that can be edited according to color channels, for example.

The examples below were just default settings. Or one can deal with custom white points through custom temperatures or CIE coordinates. As you can see, the Spyder2PRO version offers a lot of choices for creating custom monitor profiles.

I started by calibrating the single CRT not part of a dual setup. I tried creating profiles a number of times, each time having to remove it and a few times having to ghost back my C drive because while everything looked good color-wise, the hour glass and pointer always appeared green. The monitor never had previously appeared to be very much out of calibration nor did it ever have a green hour glass or pointer.

Next, I found that I could not calibrate my dual monitors on one PC so I had to match the second monitor by hand. You can only calibrate the primary monitor on Windows when you have multiples if they have a single card.

You can, according to directions, calibrate both if you have a Mac, however. I hit a few rough spots when I encountered some screens stating there were errors after I had created the profile and I had quit the session, but by hitting OK, I was able to continue on and finish the session.

One even stated that there was no information for the profile created. However, when Windows opened, it did load the profile. I, then, turned on my other set of dual monitors which remained calibrated by hand. Part of the problem, other than the green pointer on one of the CRTs was that the basic image in the white areas on the monitor of the dual pair was so bright that it hurt my eyes to look at the screen. I could not lessen this by just lowering the brightness of the monitor for, then, it compressed the darker ends of the gray scale.

This was not the first hardware calibrator that I had found that did not do that good a job on my CRTs. I removed the profile and the program and went back to my original calibration. It is possible that I prefer to work with a slightly darker screen than do other people.

While it was possible that I could have used more of the tools available, experimented with the curves, the white point settings, etc. My criteria for calibration were: how well did articles I photographed match in color on the monitor and in print to the original, how neutral were my grays, and how well do my monitors match under different Windows systems? While I cannot say everything is perfect, I can say that they meet my very critical standards even though my Epson R prints slightly darker than I like.

It removes that beautifully and creates a grayscale that is very neutral and incrementally even. My testing goal was to see if I could, in general, lighten a little my overall prints produced by my Epson R printer. While I was satisfied with the profiles, there were times when I felt that the prints were a little too dark. ColorVision stated that there were more profiles available on there web site than were contained in the software; however, I could not find them.

For my Epson R there were two profiles available: one for matte type paper and one for glossy type paper. These were to be used as generic profiles with all types of Epson paper. Once you choose a profile, you adjust the following controls and keep making proofs from these controls. The proofs are not cumulative, so it is a good idea each time you make a proof to keep track of the settings.

You choose from Custom, Color, or Black and White. You have the choice of printing in quadrants to save paper or full screen.