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You've read my page on calibration and profiling
and have decided to do something about it. Here are some software (and
partially hardware) packages I've come across:
Monitor
A nice platform-independent way of calibrating your monitor is on the website
of ePaperPress. If you are on
MacOS X, you have monitor adjustment built in the System Settings panel
under Display; under Windows, you can use a calibration package like
Praxisoft's WiziWYG which
is free in the basic version. Under Windows and Linux, there's a program
called 'qtmonitorprofiler' available from LittleCMS which should work
fine as well (note: you'll have some trouble compiling this on a modern Linux
distro - I'll put my compiled version here later on). Photoshop under windows
will install a control panel for monitor profiling which is really good.
If you have money to spend, buy a hardware device like a ColorVision Spyder to have it all
done for you and be sure it's done correctly. But this may be overkill for
amateurs - I certainly don't put it on top of my list, because a good modern
quality monitor will be close to the ideal (sRGB) already, except for gamma
which is tunable by eye.
Scanner
Even though your scanner is not the most important tool for a digital
photographer, you need a calibrated scanner in order to read the output of
your printer for calibration purposes. For this, you will need a standardized
calibration target according to the IT 8.7 standard. Kodak, Fuji etcetera
supply very expensive targets, but you're just as well off with a reasonably
priced target from Wolfgang
Faust. I bought the C1 target - it's a bit more expensive than the R1
target, but as far as I know it's mostly the same and with the larger size and
the thick backing it is useful for your camera as well (it never hurts to
shoot a picture of the thing for when you do want accurate color
reproduction). For a free solution, you can use qtscannerprofiler from the
LittleCMS profiling
toolkit, but as you want to profile your printer also and LittleCMS does
not understand that, something like Profile Prism which comes with
targets and does cameras, printers and scanners is probably a better solution.
Printer
The process here is simple: you print a test image, scan it with your
calibrated scanner, and have the profiling software spit out
a profile for you. The nag here is that the calibration target and your
printed image use different pigments (the target typically is a chemically
developed print, not an inkjet print), and scanners respond differently to
these different pigments than your eye does (it also responds differently to
these different pigments, but in a different way from your scanner - follow
it?). So you may still get variations, also depending of course on your
scanner, etcetera. There are hardware solutions here and also you can use an
external service to measure test prints with a calibrated densitometer, but
that's more expensive than trying it yourself.
Of course, you can also send the test image off
to your favorite external printing lab and scan the resulting print
(tell them not to correct anything, not now nor ever, and you'll have
a professional quality calibrated printer to your disposal - I am planning to
do this with my local Fuju Minilab, will tell you the results).
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