Studio XR2

Studio XR2 is a bundle of three products designed to help digital photographers and designers get to grips with colour management.

The package’s most expensive component is the Eye-One Display2 from GretagMacbeth, a colorimeter that can profile CRT and LCD screens, as well as laptops, ensuring screens display accurate colour. The Display2 is a next-generation device, offering an enhanced sensor, faster measurements and a new ambient light-head, which allows profiles to be adapted for varying light conditions.

The device is connected via USB, and attaches either via a series of small suckers (for hooded CRTs) or with the help of a counterweight that’s hung from the USB cable (for unhooded CRTs, LCDs and laptops). You can use it to calibrate multiple systems without license implications.

The device comes with Eye-One Match 3.6, a wizard-based software application that allows users with no previous knowledge of colour management to create true monitor profiles. A before-and-after feature at the end of the calibration process gives an instant and reassuring indication of how awful your monitor colours were before calibration.

The second element is the Kodak Colour Management Check-Up Kit, a set of seven digital test files with identical photographic reference prints that provide an at-a-glance way to check if colour is going adrift on either your monitor or printer. Fortnightly calibrations using the Display2 should guarantee accurate on-screen colour, but as screens age, colour integrity can fail and it’s worthwhile having another visual point of reference such as this.

Calibrating your printer is a different process. By-eye colour management solutions may keep your printer reasonably accurate, but if you work in a colour-critical environment the only way to create printer profiles robust enough for professional use is to use a photospectometer to measure your printer or proofer’s colour output.

Wrapping up the XR2 bundle is Total Balance, a durable, foldaway, double-sided grey-and-white flexible card. This provides an 18 per cent grey neutral background for light-meter readings so you can ensure your images are correctly exposed, while the white side can be used for in-camera white balancing.

Studio XR2 has more to offer photographers than designers. Not only will photographers make far more use of Total Balance, but they are less likely to demand a more rigorous print-profiling approach than offered by the Check-Up Kit. Online designers might do better to buy a standalone Eye-One Display2 because this is all the colour management they’ll need. Print designers should look at a high-end monitor-printer calibration solution, such as the Eye-One Photo LT.

For designers in between, the XR2 is a sound starting point – not least because it offers a £50 saving on the cost of purchasing the three components individually.