In the spring of 2020 I purchased a professional printer so I could finally make my own prints - something I feel is a huge part of my landscape photography; it doesn’t feel complete until I have something tangible at the end and printing my own work continues the process for me. I also very much enjoy the craft of printing, almost as much as I enjoy being out making the photographs.
So, naturally I wanted to have accuracy in my printing. This accuracy is achieved in many ways, editing effectively as well as paper selection and printer calibration. However, this is all done through my computer screen, so ensuring this is displaying accurate colour is essential to the entire process.
To calibrate my screen I used the SpyderX Pro from Datacolor. Now, full disclosure, I did not pay for this device as it was sent to me. I have started receiving offers from brands to use their products, but always said that I would only accept offers from brands whose products I would actually buy myself. The following describes my experience of using the SpyderX Pro and is entirely my opinion, however, I only have positive things to say!
After installing the calibration software and plugging in the device (USB) to my iMac 27” 5K model the process was simple and the software guided me through each step. One really important point is to let your display warm up for at least 30 minutes before calibration (which the software reminds you to do). After making a brew and faffing about on Lightroom with one of my images I decided the display would now be warm enough to begin the calibration.
The first thing I am asked to do is select my screen backlight: mine is Wide LED, but it tells you which to choose. Next I am asked to place the SpyderX Pro on my desk and let it take an ambient room light reading. I ensured I did this in the middle of the day and that there is no direct sunlight on the device, which is easy as my office is East facing and the sun had swung South.
You are then prompted to hang the SpyderX Pro over the top of your display, which is easier than it looks as the device is nicely counterweighted by the cover (see image above). The software also shows an outline on your display that guides you where to place the device. I then selected the Full Calibration option, but you also have the option to check or recalibrate, which is handy.
I did find the next step a little bit tricky, but once I had played with it a bit I got the hang of it. It asks you to keep adjusting your display brightness so that the Current and Target brightness are within 4% of each other. This is an iterative process and you have to keep increasing and decreasing your brightness incrementaly until the boundary between the white and black bars falls between the green targets (see below).
After this slightly tricky section, it was all down to the SpyderX Pro. I set the calibration off and quite enjoyed watching all the different colours light up my screen! I leaned back to relax as the device did its work, however I couldn’t relax long as this was over in less than 2 minutes! I did not expect it to be this fast.
After the calibration has completed it lets you save the settings and gives you some images to see the before and after calibration. The most noticeable result of my calibration was that my screen had been slightly warmed in colour temperature by the device, suggesting it was probably too cool before. Accurate white balance is really important for printing so I am incredibly happy with this. I won’t go in to the full details of what the SpyderX Pro changed for me, because it isn’t that exciting to read!
What I did really like was the graph of the colour space shown at the end, where it compares your calibrated screen’s colour space to numerous common colour spaces (below). I work in sRGB all the time, so seeing that my calibrated screen fully encompasses the sRGB colour space was really important for me, especially for editing and printing. I am by no means a colour expert, but I am learning. If you would like to learn more about colour spaces I highly recommend you watch Alex Nail’s YouTube video in which he discusses the topic with Tim Parkin. Alex is a fantastic landscape photographer who has taught me a lot about colour and editing and I highly recommend his YouTube channel (he also does big fun hiking adventures too!)
So, I am really happy with the Datacolor SpyderX Pro; it is very fast, simple to use, essential for my foray into printing and also gives the cool colour gamut graph at the end, which is not only interesting but also reassuring as I work in sRGB. If you are a landscape photographer (or any other photographer) and want to be editing and printing accurately I highly recommend you calibrate your screen. I notice the results in my prints which, more often than not, are bang on what I was expecting after pressing the print button. Even if you don’t own a printer and send your work to a lab to be printed, having a calibrated screen is still very important.
Loads more information can be found on the Datacolor SpyderX web page.
Thanks for reading,
James