ColorVision Spyder2PRO Studio

Calibrating your monitor may not be the most glamorous of tasks, but it is one of the most important, particularly if you regularly work with digital imagery. Fail to calibrate your display’s colours correctly and the quality of your print work will suffer considerably. 

While Photoshop’s Adobe Gamma utility (PC) and Display Calibrator Assistant (Mac) are powerful enough for the experienced user, they do rely solely on personal perception of colour, which can be heavily influenced by ambient factors – from the colour of your desktop to the position of lamps near your monitor. 

A more accurate method of balancing your colour profile is to turn to dedicated hardware, such as the ColorVision Spyder. This excellent piece of kit clamps to your screen and, with the help of installed software, runs your system through a number of tests. These then enable you to make precise changes to your monitor’s RGB and Kelvin colour measurement ranges, removing the guesswork that so often leads to the failings behind the average visual calibration. 

The process is simplicity itself. The hardware gauges your monitor’s output before returning its results, leaving you to manually change the RGB or Kelvin levels to balance gamma, colour temperature and black and white luminance. 

A custom ICC (International Color Consortium) profile is then created for future use, so you can be sure that your colours shine through as they should be seen. (The software presents a before and after snapshot of your ICC profile, so you can see the difference clearly.) 

The Spyder2PRO Studio sits at the head of a range of products aimed at the professional user and provides advantages over the basic ColorPlus and intermediate Spyder2 variants with ultimate calibration accuracy, unlimited monitor gamma and temperature choices, the ability to create custom targets and support for multiple monitors. 

It also comes bundled with some excellent software. DoctorPRO 2.3 provides assistance in printer calibration, while Pantone Colorist helps you access and match well over 1,000 Pantone colours using the sRGB colour space standard, so you can be assured your web colours match your print. Then there’s nik’s Color Efex Pro 2.0, which provides a range of Photoshop filters tailored to the needs of designers working with bitmap content. 

The price of this professional Studio version of Spyder is more than justified by the inclusion of such titles. Besides being able to accurately calibrate your primary viewing hardware, you also benefit from software that ensures your monitor images, printed documents and web-safe Pantone conversions remain faithful to their source.