Hi Everyone,
Have a 22in monitor and need to calibrate. Any suggestions i achieve ?
Happy New Year to everyone. I am getting better since last operation and hope to enjoy more of RR in the future.
Chris:)

Have you got Adobe Photoshop?.  If so it comes with quite a good calibration tool. I used it to set mine up.

Attached Link: http://www.bodoni.co.uk/gretagmacbetheyeonedisplay2-p-143.html

Top one imo!

ColorVision Spyder2 Express from amazon UK **£66.99

ColorVision Spyder2 Express** from amazon **$57.00
**
There are also web sites that can help ... 

Monitor Calibration

Just google 'Monitor Calibration' for moe of them. 

HTH

--
Martin

Have bought the spyder but they havent sent as yet. Cant do any printing until i receive it. 
Chris

I very nearly brought the Spyder myself Chris....then I discovered Gretag One Eye.
Just a preference I guess.

Personally I think the whole colour monitor  calibration an utter waste of money and if the Monitor is new or you think it is way off then maybe it is worthwhile.. But to be accurate what is the point of having just one part of the cailbration done. as the camera,  the profiles you use, the software  and the printer all need the same sort of process.. Take a look at the costs of the whole package! 

I agree that it's not good to be a maniac. I also agree that for the Internet, there's no use in calibrating if your monitor is not too far off that is.
But I don't agree when it's for yourself. The closer what you see on your screen matched your scanned original on one side, and your print on the other side, the better.
Getting a profile for your priter with the paper you fancy is not that expensive. Here, several photography shops offer that service.

But it's true that "perfect" calibration only makes sense in the world of offset-printers and designers who have to make shure what they create will also be what is printed after having been digested by several different computers.

I see that danob dismissed,

colour monitor calibration [as] an utter waste of money

... and went on to say,

to be accurate what is the point of having just one part of the cailbration done

As I see it, we are talking about color and error(s) in the color ... and
management of those errors.

Yes, if you want absolute color accuracy, you must calibrate each step
of the process.

Does that mean that if you're not going to calibrate each step, that
you shouldn't fix the errors that you are able to fix?  ... does that mean
that if you know your monitor isn't properly calibrated (or even if you
just think it's out of calibration), that you shouldn't correct it?

Remember, monitor calibration affects everything you see on your PC
-- not just your own work, but everything you see. 

--
Martin

I cannot imagine how you could work effectively without calibrating, for me it is not a waste of money. 

If anything it saves me money because I do not waste expensive paper producing prints that are not as I thought they would be when I clicked the print button. If I were to work with trial and error, printing with no colour management, hoping to get a print that looked like the finished image I saw and liked on my screen, I am sure I would get through reams of expensive photo paper. 

I calibrate my monitor and use the appropriate colour profile for the type of paper I am printing onto. I don't do colour critical commercial work but if I did I would calibrate from start with the initial capture.  

I am not saying it is a waste of money but in order to get accurate results the  Hardware / Software solutions  that does this properly across all the profiles that need to be adjusted are well over £800 and the other versions are cut down to such an extent to make them in my view a waste of money.. Why would they produce hardware/software solutions for far less than this!

The problems I found include  proprietary loader thats used, lacks intelligence. It should  store the video driver version, resolution, refresh rate, etc. in a custom tag. Each time any setting is changed because the software does not  check these values at system startup. If they are not the ones the profile was built for, should pop up a notification dialog. 
A way to validate that the calibration data are written correctly to the video card during the measurement and profiling stage. A simple check of black, middle gray, and white will suffice. 

And also they should follow the ICC  profile format specifications. In cases where the V2 spec is more restrictive, follow it instead to maintain compatibility with older software. No more forgetting to adapt the chromaticity values to D50 or writing profiles with tag offset problems

I don't use hardware to calibrate. I have a Viewsonic monitor that came with software called "Perfect Suite". When you would compare Adobe Gamma to Levels, then Perfect Suite is like Curves. You set black and white and have several intermediate brightneses that are corrected. I find this very intuitive and what comes out of my printer matches quite well what I see on the monitor. It can never match perfectly as a monitor shows RGB (and not even sRGB except for very expensive exceptions) and your printer four inks with eventually some helpers. The more helpers, the closer, but there will always be some hues that are not identical.

As for the camera: when colours need to be very close to perfect, I use a QPCard with Raw+Bibble with Claire plugin.

http://www.qpcard.se/BizPart.aspx?tabId=31&prod=3&catId=1
http://nexi.com/239

The only important thing is that you have to be happy with what you do.

Once again, Tanchelyn has taught me something new ...

I followed the link for the QPcard and found that if is made in Goteborg,
Sweden and is priced at $20.95 (plus I wonder how much postage). 

The Claire color matching softwre is free for use with Bibble

On adorama.com, the QPcard is $19.95 and probably less postage than
from Goteborg, Sweden; in addition, they offer the QPcard Colorkit 1 for
$99.95 (that includes 5 of the QPcard 201 and software to make the
color correction an automatic batch process -- sounds very nice. 

Maybe we should take up a collection for the "professional"photographer
who botched the eye color in a $700 portrait. 

--
Martin