Adventures of an Idiot - occasional ramblings of a photography freak

After climbing on board the digital photography bandwagon I invested in a new laptop (to add to my mysteriously growing collection of computers… any excuse to get a new toy to play with) primarily to handle all my photo, media, and web endeavours.
Super machine it is too… an Acer with a 17″ screen and preinstalled with Windows XP Media edition (not quite had the desire to “upgrade” to Vista yet, but that’ll be a good reason to acquire yet another machine in the future I don’t doubt).
Only problem is, I screwed up on the RAM so its got 512Mb rather than the preferable 1Gb (or even better, 2Gb). Consequently processing (particularly RAW files in Adobe Lightroom) can be a tad on the slow side.

However, that aside its a joy to work with. Sort of. Apart from one minor annoyance that’s been bugging me from the outset.
The screen, lovely though it is, has a distinct blue colour cast to it. And try as I might (through the on-board colour calibration app that’s actually quite comprehensive) I just haven’t been able to get the colour balance quite right.

Now for some folk this might not be a big issue. After all, a lot of people aren’t even aware of the implications of colour balance so simply put up with what they’ve got or at best adjust the contrast and brightness (which also has certain ramifications for the on-line display of photos, but I’m hoping a mate of mine will do a post about that on his own blog).

However, coming from a printing/graphics background I’m very conscious of this sort of anomaly and it really bugs me. Its also made me very aware of how vulnerable I am to disastrous mistakes when tweaking white balance etc at the post-processing stage, and indeed just examining photos for obvious defects in colour etc.
And given that I upload the bulk of my output to Flickr there’s the concern that visitors to my Flickr photostream will not be seeing a given photo in the same way as I.

Hitherto I’ve overcome this hurdle to some extent by using how I see other peoples’ photos on Flickr (via this colour-biased machine) as a rough guide to post-processing my own (wherever I consider that necessary). For clearly, everything I see on this machine will exhibit the same colour cast.
Not an ideal solution admittedly, but I’ve managed reasonably well to date, and I always cross-check results by then looking at the pics with another machine of mine (which, bizarrely, has a distinct yellow bias!).

But in the context of my former pro background the entire approach offends my concept of what’s “right” in the sense of working to an objective and constant standard.
Had I never become involved with digital photography it probably wouldn’t have bothered me overmuch (in fact, I’d always been aware of the issue of colour balance on monitors sort of semi-consciously and it hadn’t bothered me for nothing I’d been doing on computers up until the photo-addiction was really colour-critical).

Well, at last my travails are at an end! A mate has just passed on to me a “huey colour calibration” gizmo that he no longer uses. It works to the Pantone colour standard (with which I’m well familiar thanks to my years in the printing trade) and its an absolute doddle to use.
From installing the software through to ending up with a properly calibrated screen took me less than ten minutes (which included a reboot!) and I’ve now got the complete comfort and confidence of knowing that I’ve brought a significant degree of consistency to whatever I do with my pics colour-wise.
Moreover, when not actually being used to set the initial calibration of the screen this gadget sits in its own little cradle and monitors the colour temperature of the ambient lighting, feeding this data back to the computer (via a USB port) and automatically making whatever adjustments are necessary without any intervention from me.

This means of course that it doesn’t matter what time of the day or night I do my photo processing; whether the room is flooded with sunlight or the rather less glaring illumination of the light bulb, I can now be assured that my screen’s displaying a consistent representation of my pics.

Ok, its one extra drain on system resources (my process diagnostics tool reports its RAM size at 2,632K with a Virtual Memory usage of 3,476k) but that really is negligible in context of the significant improvement its brought to the display.
I’m well impressed, so my mate can treat himself to a huge virtual hug from me.

There is the remaining issue of course that I can’t determine how other people will be seeing my work on Flickr and suchlike, but in fairness that’s not really my problem. At least I’ve gone as far as I possibly can in trying to work to an almost universal standard (at least in the graphics trade) that others could also adopt if they so choose.
And its given me a helluva lot more confidence in any of the post-processing I’m now doing.

All that I have to do now is re-calibrate the screens of all my other machines to bring them all into line. Damn!