Thomas is a professional fine art photographer and writer specialising in photography related instructional books as well as travel writing and street photography.
All tagged Calibration
I’ve had the Spyder X attached to my computer for over a week now, and for the most part there isn’t much one needs to do. It does continue to work away in the background though, so I wanted to give it some time to see what it was like to be using it over a longer period.
Having worked in both the print, photography and video industries for a long time, I’ve always appreciated the importance of having a properly calibrated display. It can actually make a huge difference, especially if you’re collaborating with others or having you work printed or so on. Over the years I’ve used a variety of calibration tools, and I’ve recently been trying out a new calibration system for my computer, the Datacolor Spyder X.
I've been using a defunct Pantone Huey Pro to calibrate my display, for pretty much as long as I can remember. While the device hasn't been officially supported for a while, it had continued to function until recently. Since El Capitan came out, the software hasn't been working properly, and my display has been slowly drifting. On top of that, somewhere along the way, the gamma got screwed up, which I didn't realise. So the upshot of this is that my screen was too bright, and so I was outputting my images too dark.
A while ago I wrote a blog post about my issues with A6000 images in Lightroom not being calibrated particularly well. I included some calibration settings in the form of a pair of Lightroom presets. Since then, I’ve been doing some more work on trying to get a starting point that I’m happy with. With that in mind, here is my latest version of my Sony A6000 calibration preset that I’m ow using on my A6000 images in Lightroom.
I’ve been using the little Sony A6000 now for almost a year and it’s a great little camera for the price. One of the things that had been frustrating me however is that I always found that I wasn’t quite satisfied with the look of the raw files when processed in Lightroom. To me, the colours never looked quite right, and so I set about doing something about it. Having shot lots of test shots on multiple cameras for comparison, I’ve developed two approaches to addressing my concerns. First, I tweaked the default white balances, and second, I tweaked the calibration settings in Lightroom to come up with what I believe is a more pleasing look.
