I bought the cheapest Spyder 5 express from Datacolor and it makes certainly a difference. You can't really make justice to any of yours or anyone else pictures if you have the wrong color. It is like buying a 4k TV for a sillion of money and watching with sunglasses but people are still convinced the pictures of a $5k camera will show perfectly right on any monitor. It is just mindblowing. Just buy any of these Spyders and you will make the process from the camera to the monitor to your eyes, a more balanced process. If you are printing, it needs a calibration to to be equally balanced to the rest of your gear, including your eyes. Thanks Zack for bringing this up!!

Hey Zack! That was really informative. Thanks for sharing.

I definitely need this! All my photos look black and white!!!😭

I love this topic. I got interested in color management because when I was starting, I sent some photos to a online lab and the colors were completely off. I complained and they never responded, so I decided to learn how to handle color myself. Thank you for approaching this subject.

Such a sexy topic! This has been in my wishlist for so long. Maybe I should've pulled the trigger on it before experimenting with nonsense. Looking at you black pro mist filter.

One of the big pluses of monitor calibration is when you print. BTW i've got a Benq 27 Adobe RGB monitor and the Spyder X works quite well with the Benq software

10 years a slightly colourblind photographer, bought one of these in Feb this year and it's made the world of difference. Should have bought one years ago.

Hi Zack, I really appreciate how you explain this issue. How about the Color Edge monitors, 'selfcalibrating' like the EIZO?

Calibrating my monitor now after one month not calibrating it. I am using a 10 -year old Spyder 3. Good enough and accurate enough.

Best thing you can do for yourself, is calibrate your monitor....I had the full spyder studio kit, incredible set up that calibrated your monitor and printers.....Man that stuff was sorcery but you could guarentee what you edited in your digital darkroom looked the same on the screen and on the prints you made

Very informative information, thank you. I have a question. How can I calibrate the screen on my dell laptop onto a second screen connected to laptop from dell?

Appreciate the video. Where do i purchase one of these? Would like to perform t his on my iMac

I personally experienced it, I tried to color grade a photo to blue-ish aqua and the output was green, which was miles off the color I was aiming to. I loaded the photo to my ipad and phone i was using at the time, and i blam lenovo putting garbage panels in their laptop with 45% coverage of srgb wiht super high delta e number. I was broke at that time, so what i did was remoting my screen to my ipad and do the color using the ipad as a reference monitor, which is not ideal, but way better than the one that comes with the laptop. I used to rent them, now I own one

Hi Zack, your help would greatly be appreciated. How do I calibrate an Apple cinema display screen (2010), a MacBook pro plus a wacom cintiq pro?

So how do you go in and select the other profiles? Thanks!

$$$ Savings Tip: The hardware is usually the same for all these calibration hardware, when you pay the extra money you are actually paying for different software. If you want to save some money consider purchasing the "low end" hardware and use the open source app DisplayCal. In my experience DisplayCal give you much better results over the manufactures own software (unless you are using something high end that communicated directly with the monitor like Eizo software in which case if you own a Eizo you probably already know a lot about color and calibration).

Thanks Zach. This is something I have "been meaning to do", but darn it, my car reg is due, etc etc ect! So, If I said that I don't print often, but when I do the colours(sorry Oz spelling) always seem NQR, will calibrating my monitor and adjusting the colours to a more "correct" value be interpreted by my printer (Epson WF-7610 in my case), to give me a more "correct" print? Thanks again. And, just interested, my boy is Zak,( Zachary). You?

Hi Zack, you got me there ... I kinda avoid this topic as well, "But damn I want this and that lens first ... and this new flash (G.A.S²)" ... you know the drill. But what happens to all this True Tone and night shift stuff on your Mac? Thats gotta be turned off, right?

Hey zack. I usually work off a laptop and a portable 2nd screen. When I calibrate the screens, there is still an obvious difference between them. Any ideas on getting them "synced" for lack of a better word?

Thanks for addressing calibration in this video, for some reason people (especially just starting out in the business) seem to shy away from it. But I totally agree with you, absolutely necessary! The one thing you can rely on like a brick. Did you change your mic? You sound very telephony all of a sudden...

Can you calibrate a HDR Monitor in HDR mode with this tool?

Definitely in the running for the "Least Sexiest" part of being a legit photographer, haha. Great info though and it's about time I run mine again, ugh.

Is it compatible with any monitor?

What are the differences between the models; let’s say elite and pro?

Will the Spyder x pro be good enough for my iMac? It’s $100 less than elite.

I ran across a strange calibration issue. Or possible calibration issue. Not long back I made a book of photographs via MagCloud and they came out as well as I could have expected. What's on the screen matches what appeared in print-not perfectly, but I didn't expect perfection going from RGB images on-screen to a book printed using a CMYK process. (The monitor had been calibrated. The raw editing was done entirely in Capture One.) _BUT._ When Phase One does its let's-edit-a-photo sessions on KZfaq and I download their sample images, what I see on the screen within Capture One in no way resembles what I see in the Phase One video. The image within Capture One on my machine is invariably too saturated and too red. If you don't tell Capture One to display color per the currently selected output recipe, you might get a badly distorted idea of the color on-screen. But I do have it displaying using the current recipe's output profile (almost always sRGB). So - the only images that look way off on this monitor are the samples from Phase One. But those guys think it's a problem at my end. They're probably right-but damned if I know what the problem might be.

how does the apple screen stack up over time?? does it vary??

Once all the craziness in the world has settled down any plans to get to Oz?

We talked about this, with other videos, but today I *was* seeing video and audio out of sync.

Can an iPad be calibrated?

Are you stalking me Zack Alexa..... I was just discussing with the wife twenty mins ago whether to buy this or a viking ring and this appears. It can only be one or the other.

Seriously?! I need to do every month. Yikes. I about to take a slew of portraits this fall. Guess I need to get my Color monitor on. 🙄

#carlneedsahat

Zack, this will have to take the backseat to a new camera, mine's broken and am currently homeless, so ya, it can wait :{)))

If you watch this in-depth OVERLY DETAILED video, you'll find Windows Colour Calibration is in dire straits kzfaq.info/get/bejne/h7allcqg1trKkp8.html

Great information but the title does not match the content. A more appropriate title might be "Why You Should Calibrate Your Monitors"

I do get the need to calibrate the monitor if you print your photos. But if you share your work digitally, 99% of your audience is looking at your work on devices with default setting. So wouldn't it be better to make sure your photos look good in that default setting?

The audio is out of sync. It needs to be delayed.

My laptop is hideous, somewhere I have a photo taken of my laptop, my old 19" and my 27" 4K monitor displaying the same image. @@ Leaves one wondering if the lack of likes on older images is due to an algorithm burying them of because they looked tinted with old yellowed clown makeup.