Spyder4

The moment I reached home from the KL Photography Festival, my boys wanted to go out. To Marche we went. I have to leave the screen calibrating until later in the evening.

But it was won the wait. I unpacked the unit, read the simple instructions and downloaded the latest software from the Net. Program installed and I was soon calibrating.

I just followed the clear instruction from the software. Since I have a couple of screens, it detected them both and asked which screen I wanted to calibrate first. Each screen took about 10 minutes and when I was done, I was more than impressed with the new setting.

I did not realise how cold my colour temperature on the screen were before the calibration. Now, the photos came to life, and the colour were much more pleasing, not to mention that the skin tones were much more life-like. What was more important was both the screen now looked comparable. The Samsung screen used to have a light blue tinge to it before.

I then calibrated my laptops, and certainly the LCD screen looked much better since. Definitely worth the investment ......

The SpyderCube

I have always struggled to get the perfect white balance when shooting using my digital camera. I thought shooting RAW would make things better. But all it did was slow down my workflow, and for the last couple of years, I almost exclusively shoot jpeg, even on my 7D. When it came to the X100 and the X-Pro1, jpeg was definitely the choice for me due to the superior on camera Jpeg engine Fuji had developed. The noise level from the camera coming straight off the camera was definitely better than what I could develop manually in Adobe Bridge, not to mention the almost perfect skin colour rendition.

But when it came to still life and studio lighting, getting the perfect colour maybe possible, usually using a grey card. The SpyderCube made this process much easier though. I shot the 7D in RAW, took the first frame with the cube on sight, and just cut and paste the white balance setting on the subsequent frames in my Aperture. Convenient indeed. And I was impressed with the results. Obviously helped by the new lightbox I had just purchased ......

Another worthy investment to be honest. I actually bought a studio set from Datacolor which contained the SpyderCube, Spyder4Elite and well as printer print colour analyser. I have yet to use the print analyser as yet. Indeed to investor a proper printer first however ......