Monitor calibration advice

I recently moved house and the move meant my monitor travelled and then wasn't used for several months. It is an Apple Cinema display on Mac Pro and it is reasonable old now - the style with metal all the way around.

The monitor is/was calibrated (Spider 3 - at 6500K, 2.2 - or more recently D65, L* on Coloreyes) and I have always been happy with how my images look on screen and how they print (in magazines - I am not a home printer). Many people often comment that my pictures are regularly the best printed in a mag (particular in Dive in the UK, where I write a column each month). I just calibrated semi-regularly and never gave it much further thought.

But since the move - I have not been getting calibrations that look right to me - they are not far off - just look a bit greeny or muddy looking on yellows! It is very minor - and I have had no complaints from anyone I have sent images too recently. I also think it might be because I have got used to my laptop screen as a standard while I have been on the road!

But this slight colour cast is across everything on my desktop - even a blank document. I have resorted to calibrating at a slightly high K - 6700, to get them looking right - but this doesn't seem like a good idea to me. Or is this a reasonable compensation for drift in my ageing monitor.

Anybody got any suggestions? Maybe it is time for a new screen, or maybe my spider hardware needs replacing? Or should I just ignore it! This is a minor thing - it is just something that was zero problem before.

What are other people calibrating their studio displays to? If I use D65/6500K settings - mine is slightly too greeny/muddy.

Alex

p.s. Here are a couple of images for evaluation - please note they are in Adobe RGB 1998 colour space - so should be downloaded and viewed in Photoshop. One is a saturated and colourful reef scene, one is a UK shot, with a natural greeny colour cast. I would like to know if you see a colour cast across both images or not (I am not interested in minor comments on colours).

Viewing these on my laptop (in Safari and Photoshop) they both have a very slight pinky colour cast (which is either the result of my laptop being too pinky or my desktop being too greeny)!

Let me know which you see!

Alex

Hi Alex,

Well I am looking at these images on a Panasonic CF-T7 laptop-owned by my dear old father in law. It has never ever been calibrated.

I can't see any colour casts you describe.

Maybe I need to get my magnifying glass out.

D

I don't see a cast - am on Sony Vaio (never calibrated) and Firefox at the moment. Will have a look on iMac though as well shortly.

Hi Alex,

No color cast on my Macbook Pro. (Calibrated)

Adam

Downloaded and viewed in PS (Win) on my week old Samsung 2370, calibrated with Colormunki yesterday morning.

Any colour corrections I try to make end up pretty much at 0,0,0.

Do you need to adjust your eye to your new room.

I've had my Spyder for a couple of years now and recently I got it out to recalibrate my macbook and the colour cast is unreal. This isn't a case of not being used to it, it's clearly overly-pink.

I think I may need to renew my Spyder hardware.

They look fine on iMac and Safari, too!

Alex, I recently used a spyder 3 on a macbook pro and macbook air, and on both systems I got a green cast over everything. It took a lot of fiddling with the spyder 3 provided software to get it looking somewhat right, and im still not happy. Granted, im not using coloreyes or eyeone or anything. I really should.

Your 2 images look fine to me on my desktop monitor, which should be calibrated ok.

Images look well balanced on my 24" Samsung 2494 Spyder 3 calibrated -- no pinkish or greenish cast to me.

Your images look fine on my Dell U2410 calibrated with i1 display 2 (2008 MacPro w/5870, OSX 10.6.6).

One thing I always do when calibrating is to make sure the monitor has been turned on and running for over 30 minutes.

The back light for many non-LED back-lit flat panel displays needs time to warm up.

Take Care,

ChrisS

Thanks for the reassurance guys. Much appreciated.

Alex

They look fine on an eye-one calibrated Imac and on an old Apple studio monitor.

Bill

Looks perfect on my Cinema display. Even if I scrunch my one eye a little and cross them, it still looks corrects.

But this slight colour cast is across everything on my desktop - even a blank document. I have resorted to calibrating at a slightly high K - 6700, to get them looking right - but this doesn't seem like a good idea to me. Or is this a reasonable compensation for drift in my ageing monitor.

I think it's a great idea, but what do I know. I've experienced the aging drift of a monitor, but that was a CRT. Do LCD/LED monitors age like the CRTs used to?

I had the original Spyder. I recall using it the first time and thinking, "Huh? This is awful!". I did the same calibration several times with different results until finally one was perfect. I'm pretty sure that's not it's supposed to work either.