5elitemac-20

[Damien Symonds]

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SpyderTune

Since you’ve decided that your colour is pretty darn close, but could benefit from some slight tweaking, it’s time to explore the feature which sets the SpyderElite apart from its cheaper siblings:

The SpyderTune screen looks like this:

On the right are the sliders which allow you to make small adjustments to the colour of your screen:

Those sliders behave similarly (although not identically) to the Temperature and Tint sliders you’re probably familiar with in your raw processing program. So if you have some experience with raw editing, I expect you’ll find these sliders fairly intuitive.

PLEASE DON’T RUSH THIS. Take your time, opening your test print files one at a time, making tweaks to those sliders, then opening the next image to see how it fared, make more tiny tweaks as necessary, and so on. I expect you’ll open all five of your files at least three times each, while you satisfy yourself about your modifications.

I’d love to tell you that you’ll be able to make all five files match their prints exactly. Alas, it won’t happen. Your goal is to find settings that give a tolerable average match across the set. That is the nature of calibration in general.

The other sliders

You’ll see there are two other sliders – “Gamma” and “Brightness“. By clicking the link to come to this page, you’ve already decided that your brightness was ok, so I hope you won’t need to touch that slider. However, some tiny tweaks to the Gamma slider might be ok, if you find it essential. Not too much, though!

The buttons

If you’ve moved the sliders too much, and made a mess, that’s not a problem. Just hit the “Reset” button and start over. Don’t worry, it won’t undo your whole calibration, just these SpyderTune sliders.

The “Switch” button is as pointless as ever, sadly. It would be nice if it showed just the before-and-after of your slider tweaking, but at this stage, it shows the before-and-after of the whole calibration. I hope Datacolor might change this functionality in the future.

Once you’re happy that the sliders are perfect, press the “Save” button to embed those tweaks in the monitor profile. Then press the “Next” button to complete the process.

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