Calibrating your monitor with the Spyder 3 Elite... Can you say E.A.S.Y.

Before I get going on today's post I want to show you this picture I took Tuesday morning.  This is the view I saw when I glanced out my window.  It was pretty awesome so I grabbed my camera, dropped it on my tripod, and got off a shot.  I did very little in Lightroom except increase the contrast to eliminate the fuzziness that is inherent in digital photos.  I was amazed at how quickly the light changed.  A couple of minutes after I took this shot, literally, the sun had risen and the sky had lost it's color.  For a brief moment, however, the suns reflection off the clouds and the atmosphere was  spectacular.

On monday I wrote about how to take great basketball photos, and I said that on Wednesday I would talk about how you can make your sport photo really "shine" through post-processing in Lightroom.  Now it's Wednesday... and I really want to talk about the Spyder 3 Elite calibrator because I calibrated my monitors for the first time yesterday and was really impressed with the result.  So I have decided to bump the post-processing blog to Friday. 

Calibrating your monitor with the Spyder 3 Elite

I use two side by side computer monitors at the office and they have never matched colorwise.  I have tried manually adjusting the monitors to get them to match and have had no luck.  I finally bit the bullet and decided to purchase a display calibrator.  After doing some research I decided to buy the Spyder 3 Elite from B&H Photo.  Let me tell you... there are a lot of options out there. 

I joined the PPA and NAPP groups through my LinkedIn account and posted a question about whether or not it is important to calibrate your monitor, and if so... what calibrator would they recommend?  I recieved 24 comments from NAPP members and 5 comments from PPA members.  LinkedIn is a social networking site for professionals and I recommend checking it out if you haven't already.  I find it very helpful in that I can pose questions to other professionals and gain great information... for free!  Spyder was one of the recommended calibrators and, based on price point and those recommendations, I decided to give it a try.

To set up and run the calibration was amazingly simple and quick.  It only took me a few minutes to start calibrating the monitors.  After loading the program, you simply hang the calibrator over your screen and you are walked step by step through the process.

Before Calibration

After Calibration

I know this is not the best picture... but trust me the monitors are very closely matched now.  That's it for today.  I will provide more of a review as I use the Spyder 3 on some of my other monitors including my laptop.

Keep shooting!

Ryan