You may remember a few weeks ago, I wrote a very brief report on my purchase of a BasICColour Discus screen calibrator/profiler (see photo). The Discus is a ‘relatively’ expensive screen calibrator, built of extremely high quality components.

I’d read a lot of reviews of the product before buying it, and the calibrations I’d seen were so tight, that I felt that this was the product for me. My old screen calibrator broke last year, and I’m in the process of preparing my images for a 2nd book, so I really wanted to make sure the images were as accurate as possible on my screen.

I’ve just done some tests comparing the Discus to a Spyder 3, but before I show you the results, I’d like to make some things very clear about calibration and profiling:

1. Not all screen calibrators are created equal.

2. Not all screens are created equal. I’ve found some screens – particularly laptop screens – a nightmare (or impossible) to profile.

3. Yes, when your calibration software says ‘calibrated successfully’, what it is really saying is that the device has calibrated/profiled your screen to the best of its ability under the circumstances.

4. The circumstances that can affect a successful calibration are things like – type of monitor you have, how well it can be calibrated, and also, the settings you wish to calibrate to. For instance, I had difficulty getting good calibrations out of my Eizo CG241W monitor and BasICColour support (which was excellent and very responsive) told me that my monitor, or a lot of modern monitors don’t like to be calibrated below 120cmd. By moving the brightness up a little on the monitor from 110cmd (my preferred luminance), I got a tighter calibration. They also asked me to adjust the black point calibration too. So I know my monitor is not ideal, but i suspect that this is the case with everything – everything is a compromise right? The other circumstances are the kind of calibrator you have, and how ‘tight’ it is calibrated itself. As I say, everything is a compromise.

Below are two graphs, showing you how ‘tight’ the Spyder 3, and also the Discus calibrations are. In essence, the colour graph shows you how far the calibration was (the achieved value) compared to the desired value. Green and amber suggest calibrations that are ‘acceptable’ while red indicates anything that is not. You can see in the Spyder calibration that it failed to calibrate the blacks well, and the achieved result is quite different from what was intended.

BasICColour-Display (the software used to calibrate and profile my monitor) says it failed to get the screen within an acceptable range under the conditions I wished to have it calibrated to, by using the Spyder 3. This does not mean that the Spyder 3 is a bad device – you get what you pay for to some degree, and I would argue that the profiles it creates on most systems are more than acceptable for most users – if you’re an amateur looking to get your screen ‘within range’, then I’d say it’s fine.

Now comparing the results from the Discus above, you can see that the delta-E (the difference between the target and achieved profiling) is much tighter. The calibration / profiling has been successful. You can see there’s still a difference in dark tones – particularly the dark blues for some reason – are a little off, but overall, I know the calibration is within an acceptable range.

I think the Discus is a very professional, tightly-calibrated device. Apart from the build quality (like picking up a piece of Tank accessory), it does seem to deliver on giving some of the best profiles around at the moment for under £1,000.

Of course, I guess you’d have to figure out if it’s worth it to yourself, and whether it matters that much. As someone who is preparing images for print in books, I think colour management is vital. I need to know that what I’m dealing with on screen is very close to what is inside the file. To me, screen calibration and colour management in particular, are as important as what camera I choose, or what tripod I buy.

As with all reviews on the web – you should really consider doing your own tests – if that’s possible. You may find that cheaper colourmeters like the X-Rite Eye One Pro, or the Spyder series are more than acceptable for your needs. But I suspect, if you’re the kind of person who must have the best (it’s certainly a fault of mine), then you may wish to look higher up in the price bracket (the Discus sells for £850 here in the UK) for something with tighter abilities. But only you can really test to see if you notice a big difference to the profiles they build…. the ultimate test really, is in viewing a profile-test-target on your monitor against a daylight illuminated print in a viewing booth.

I don’t offer this posting to say if one calibrator is better than another, and my posting is not intended to slate the Spyder 3. As I say, the Spyder 3 may be more than acceptable to you and give you profiles you’re more than happy with, but I think if there’s a message in this post – it is that even if your calibrator says it’s done it’s job and calibrated and profiled your monitor successfully, it’s the degree of how well it’s done it that is the point. Colourmeters can only get your monitor to within a certain range of the target calibration.

Just how close, and whether you’ll notice the difference –  is perhaps the most pressing question. You’ll only find out by doing your own tests. I would say though, that in order to confirm how good a profile or calibration is – you need to verify it, and that’s only really possible by comparing an evaluation target in Photoshop (colour managed) against one that is displayed under a daylight viewing booth.

For those of you who’ve been reading my blog for a while now, you’ll know I spent a bit of time last year getting a good colour managed system in my studio. Last year I bought an Epson 4880 printer and Colourbursts RIP driver. I also bought a viewing booth, which is vital in allowing me to assess and review my prints under daylight balanced light.

So my colour management was going really nicely, until my screen calibration tool broke. My trusty old Gretag Macbeth Eye One (now Xrite) started to produce wildly varying profiles, and after evaluating it on a friends system, I quickly came to the conclusion that it was broken, which probably explains why it went into the bin last year.

It’s an admission I’m not comfortable making, but I feel I must. Since last October, I’ve not been able to calibrate my screen. This might sound like terrible news…. how can Bruce work on his images if his screen is way out? Well, the simple answer is that I was able to confirm that my screen wasn’t ‘way out’. In fact, it turns out that my screen, when set to default settings was pretty much ‘way in’. Let me explain.

I’ve got an Eizo CG241W display at home. It comes from the factory calibrated. I hadn’t realised just how well calibrated it is in ‘factory-mode’ until I evaluated it whilst using a calibration test target. The test target comes in two parts – the first part is a TIFF file you open up in Photoshop, while the other part is a printed file, that when put under the viewing booth I own. If the TIFF file is opened up and the correct proofing setting enabled, both the printed file and the electronic one *should* look very similar. Well, it turns out that my test target looks pretty damn close when my Eizo is set to default settings. So this is how I was able to work for the past six months without a display calibrator.

To be fair, evaluating a printed target against one loaded up in Photoshop with proofing enabled is really the only way to ensure your calibration is true or ‘close’.

But I have to confess that good is never good enough. I’m a perfectionist, and if there’s any chance of error in what I’m seeing on my display, it does make me feel a little uneasy. So I’d had my eyes on a new screen calibration tool for some time.

Enter the BasICColour Discus. I’d read so many review of it, seen it calibrate screens much tighter than anything else on the market – I knew I had to have one. But it’s not cheap, coming in at around £850. Yep, that’s around four times the price of an Xrite i1 Pro, which has similar features.

I felt that since I was getting ready to prepare my Iceland images for my 2nd book, I should really invest in a decent screen calibrator, and well, I must confess – I was sold on the Discus. Sometimes, I’m attracted to something because there’s an element of gear-lust involved (as much as I hate to admit that I’m susceptible, just like anyone else is to being attracted to some piece of gear), and in the case of the Discus, it’s a beautifully crafted piece of engineering. It reeks quality. But is it any good?

Well, I’m not really going to give you any deep technical reviews of the Discus, but suffice to say that although the calibrations are very accurate, they’re not as tight as the reviews I read before purchase. Do I feel deflated? A little, yes. But I think overall I’m happy, because the Discus is a quality piece of solid engineering. I’m just curious as to whether it was worth the 4 times the price tag of an Xrite i1 pro though.

So is there a message in this post for you all? Perhaps. I guess it’s very easy to be swayed over by ‘expensive = better’, when in fact, we all know, as I have always done, that so long as the tools do the job, the rest is really up to us.

Ultimately, I can now get on with the main task at hand, that being preparing my Iceland images for print in my second book.

Tools are jumping boards to help us convey what our vision is, they are a means to an end. Do I wish I’d bought an Xrite i1 pro? Maybe…. but I think when it comes to making sure that colour is accurate, I would have preferred the option to test both items to see how far different the profiles are, before sinking the money. That said, now that I’ve done the deed, the profiles out of the Discus are very good indeed, so I’m not that interested in wasting my valuable time by splitting hairs between calibration devices.  That is a job for someone with some free time on their hands.

I’m in the middle of looking into setting up some printing workshops for next year.

The way I see it is that i’ve had a lot of participants over the past few years who, if they’ve mastered the editing on a computer side (otherwise known as the digital dark room in my book), few, actually print their material out. For the select few who do, there seems to be an endless disagreement about what is the right way to do it. Some find their prints too dark (a common mistake), or when viewing them, I find there’s a lot more that could have been done to optimise them.

What I find very interesting is how we ‘read’ a print. If you’ve been fortunate to seen the work of Ansel Adams in the flesh for instance, you soon realise what a great print is. It’s very easy to think that most prints are good. Most prints are mediocre. Like your first photoshop edits, over a few years, you come back to your first prints and realise they weren’t very good at all. It takes a long time to master the final print. Like I say on my workshops – there is no good-taste button in photoshop. You can go too far, over saturate, over sharpen, completely kill the image and not realise it at the time. That’s where experience comes in.

I know there’s a lot of technical stuff to cover, and most get very bogged down in that region. But shouldn’t the final print be the final statement? How do you convey what you were feeling in the final print? Many suffer because they can’t get their prints to come out in a consistent way.

Printing requires an understanding of , and adoption of colour management practices. Just how do you make sure that what you see on your computer screen – matches exactly what you anticipate in the final print? I’ve had so many emails from people who tell me they have their colour management ‘close enough’. Well, it shouldn’t be ‘close enough’. That little statement suggests that it’s not consistent and they’re sometimes surprised by what pops out of the printer.

I’d love to give a workshop on making prints. I thought it would be great to cover some of the principles of colour management right through to digital dark room techniques and then the preparation for final output. Lastly, accurate print evaluation is really important.

I’d like to run some practical hands on workshops in my office, in the centre of Edinburgh next year. At the moment, my idea is to limit each workshop to a group of four, each with a computer, Eizo display and screen calibrator – for over a weekend. We’d go through setting up our environment for colour management, editing in the digital dark room, and producing high quality prints in a repeatable – expected way on an Epson printer.

Please don’t ask me any specifics about it just yet – as I’m in the middle of trying to work it all out, but I’ll let you know when I do have a more concrete syllabus for a weekend workshop.

On Thursday I received my Epson 4880, which you can see installed in my studio below.

Needless to say, the place is starting to look more like a laboratory, but that’s fine I guess. It is where I work.

I’ve got some set up to do on it, and feel there’s a bit of a learning curve with it all. Getting familiar with equipment takes time, and I’m very much in the frame of mind about reading manuals now, and taking time to get used to all the features of a new product.

Anyway, I must thank Neil Barstow from Colourmanagement.net for all the advice and time he’s spent with me. There’s been a lot of correspondence and I’d really like to get him up here to work with me at some point to help me fine tune the colour process.

But I think seeing the actual process in flow was very important for me in making the decision to go Inkjet. I have Kyriakos Karlokoti to thank for getting in touch with me when I initially put out a feeler on this very blog for advice and help. He has been very instrumental in showing me the process and of course the results. I’m quite a technical person, having worked in IT for a long time (that’s another story), but there is really a lot of misguided information out there about colour management.

I’ve always believed very much in the traditional print and I still love Silver Gelatin papers and a well made print in the dark room, but I feel now that Fuji Crystal Archive and light jets, isn’t a road I will pursue any longer. It seems that Injket quality really has arrived. So much to my own surprise…. I remember trying it around 10 years ago and being severely dissatisfied with it and the reviewer (who shall remain nameless) who claimed it was a ready technology. I’m only glad to report that it now is a superb medium.