Increasingly I find myself shooting more digital images, mostly because of web publishing – though there are a few occasions, certainly, where shooting digital makes a lot more sense. One example is my son’s hockey games. Arena lighting – at least those where my son’s team plays – is too dim for a decent (1/300) shutter speed with a fast (f2.8) lens, even at ISO 800. With film, the shots are so grainy that it’s hardly worthwhile. My new Canon 7D, however, with its highly improved noise reduction, means that I can get excellent images at ISO 1600.
However, with digital comes the need for calibration to ensure that the colours in the image are as true as possible. Images that I’ve produced over the last few weeks I’ve post-processed on my DELL E6400 laptop. While the images looked fine on my laptop monitor, I thought they looked a little warm on another machine, but I had no way to determine which was correct until yesterday, as I didn’t have a calibration device. So this week I picked up a new Samsung 2243 LCD display along with a Spyder3 device. The Spyder3Express quite significantly shifted the colour display of my laptop monitor, and using the new calibrated colour profile on the Samsung LCD is actually pretty good as well. Using the same profile for the Samsung external monitor seems necessary as there seems to be no way with the Spyder3Express to calibrate the secondary monitor individually, and the DataColor knowledge base article seems to indicate that separate profiles don’t work for NVIDIA display cards anyway.