From the course: Video Gear

Calibrate with X-Rite i1Profiler

From the course: Video Gear

Start my 1-month free trial

Calibrate with X-Rite i1Profiler

“

- All right Rich, I'm getting excited because now finally, I get to show you how to do a hardware calibration. - Yes, yes. He loves the hardware calibration. - Now I want to make one point really clear, is that there are different components, it's the hardware that we just covered, but there's different software that you can use. I'm gonna show sort of the bundled sort of application with this i1 Pro Spectrophotometer. - Dan, give me a ballpark price. - This is about a thousand dollars and it comes with the software necessary to calibrate your computer monitor. There are other tools out there, again, from companies like Light Illusion and SpectraCal and there are various other third parties that are making calibration software, but that's a really important point. The meter, the hardware, talks to that software that then generates, as we talked when we began this week, generates things like ICC Profiles, or lots of that kind of stuff. So, what I went ahead and done, is I've plugged in my spectrophotometer, via USB into my computer, and I'm simply gonna come down here and go ahead and launch the i1 Profiler. So here's the i1 Profiler. Looks pretty intimidating. It's really, really not. Over here on the left, we can profile, or sort of calibrate a display, a projector, or if we're doing, sort of more traditional print workflow, we can also calibrate printer, scanners, and stuff like that. - So this is really both input and output devices. That's kinda cool, the fact that you can calibrate a projector. Maybe you're working in a room and you need to use a projector because you're showing your video that way to clients, this could actually help calibrate it. - Yeah, and there's different pieces in sort of different accessories that will come with the meter to be able to measure different types of things. Whether you're monitoring a direct feed display, or a projector, or you're measuring a piece of paper, things of that nature. - Nice. So go ahead and hook it up. - Yep, so we're all hooked up there. I'm gonna come over to the profiling option here, and here's basically what do you want to do, you know which display do you want to calibrate? We're gonna do my computer monitor. We have kinda the same basic choices that you had before. What sort of are you going to use as your white point? Well, D65 is probably a good one. But you'll notice that I have a lot more options here, including choosing my own XY values on a color chart, here. I can choose how bright my display is going to be. Now, for most of us a standard measurement's gonna be probably about 120 NITS, or Cendela metre squared. This measurement right there. I tend to run a little darker, just because my eyes are a little sensitive. But for most sort of average computer monitors, 120 is probably the best choice, so we'll chose that option. Then we can choose the Native Contrast Ratio, or chose our own custom contrast ratio as a target. I'll just keep that on Native. I'll go ahead to the next step, here. Here it's basically saying how are you going to measure it, with the math that you're going to use? - Well, you said a scary word there. - Yeah-- - Do you have to do math? - Don't do any math. Just let the application do it's thing. You'll notice I have the Use Defaults checked. Now the only thing that I probably do want to configure here, depending on my workflow, is that Gamma response. You'll notice that it's 2.20 again, just like we saw on the Mac, and just like we saw in the native tools. - But you said if you were working with things like color grading software, you might take that to 2.40. - You might take it to 2.40, especially in a future episode when we talk about calibrating a video display. Yeah, probably 2.20 or 2.40 is the appropriate choice. Alright, up next, I need to choose my patch set. Now you're wondering what is a patch set. Well a patch set, the way that this works, is that when you choose the size of your patch set, the hardware meter will go ahead and read different colors, different sort of tonal range values on that display. And that is how it figures out what is correct in the image. - So more patches are gonna be more accurate? Because there's more evaluations? - Absolutely! You're measuring more gradations of color, more gradations of tonality, and this particular piece of software, we can go from small which is about 118 patches, medium about 211, up to large which is about 450, 460. So, let's go ahead in the interest of time we'll go ahead and choose a small option. Not going to be perfectly accurate, but it will be fine enough for our purposes of demoing it. Now, what I'm going to do is go to the next button and the last thing I need to do is I need to calibrate the meter. Because this is a spectrophotometer, you'll notice that I have this little plate here that has a little bit of a white spot on it. - So it's using it as sort of a reference white balance? - Yeah, and this is actually unique to this particular meter. - So I shouldn't put my thumb on there and get it dirty. - No, no. The cool thing about a lot of these meters, is that you can actually send them back to the manufacturers every year or so to get them recalibrated, because after all, they do drift over time. So I'll make sure that I have the little patch there opened up. I'll simply go ahead and click calibrate, here. It will take a second to sort of calibrate and it will let me know when it's ready. - So this is basically telling the device, much like how you would white balance a camera, to white balance the device before you put it on the monitor. - Right. So now it says device is ready. Then what I'm gonna do on this particular setup, because I have a direct view display, I have a little handy little gizmo here, where I can plug in the meter right here. - This is basically like a sandbag on the other side. - Totally. I'm just gonna kinda put it right here. But don't smash that into the screen. - No, no, no, don't want to do that. - No, set it gently. Now Rob, does this need to be exactly in the center of the screen? - Naw, technically no. Because it's so close to what we call the spot size, it's so small, at this distance, it's millimeters that it's reading from. - Okay. - So it doesn't really matter whether it's the exact center, or a little left. I tend to go right around the center, simply because hey, that's probably the point of the screen I'm looking at the most. - But if I was doing something like video color correction, and I was using this upper right quadrant, would I favor that? Or does it not make much of a difference? - Doesn't really, for our intents and purposes, it doesn't really make much of a difference. There are uniformity tests that you can do with other pieces of software. You can do multiple readings on different parts of the display to see what's going on there. I'm gonna go ahead and click Start Measurement. When I do, in just a second, it's going to actually take control of my computer. The first option you see over here on the left, is saying, do you want me to automatically adjust some of the controls of your display? Now some displays, like your MacBook Pro, can be completely taken over, and the software can do everything on the display. Some displays, like the one I have on this HP laptop, nothing can be taken over, and I have to do manual adjustments. So, I'm gonna uncheck this. Go ahead and click next and it's basically gonna start running through its pattern. And there you go. What it's doing is it's displaying a color, the meter takes a reading. It then goes on to the next color. The meter takes a reading. Now this will take a little bit. Again, with uh-- - It looks like it's gonna take approximately seven minutes. - That was only 100 patches. On a video monitor, like in a really complete calibration, not uncommon to run four, five, six thousand patches. Again, this is one of the reasons that people chose colorimeters, instead of spectrophotometers for these huge patches, because the colorimeters are much faster than the spectros. After this process is done, Rich, all we're gonna do is see the results of our profile, how well we hit some of those targets, like the D65 whitepoint, the Native Gamma, that kind of stuff, if everything looks good, we can simply save this off as a profile for our monitor to use. - Alright, well let's let that finish, and then we'll check the results. - Alright Rich, so our calibration finished here, and went through all those patches. Again, it wasn't a lot of patches, but I simply went to the next button, and now I'm able to save this profile. I can call this whatever I want, kind of just like you did on both the Mac and the PC. I'll just call this, RobbieHP_Dec14. Something like that. Make sure I have a period in there. I can save this on the system level so every user can use this, or I can just save this on the user level. Here's a really cool thing. We'll talk about this, probably in the close of this week, but how often should you calibrate? We can actually have the software say hey, it's been four weeks or three weeks, or whatever-- - This is gonna pop up a reminder like maybe you should do this. - Exactly, so I tend to keep that at about a month. And then, all I have to do is click the create and save new profile, and there it is. I'm ready to go. And, if I want, I can always come over here to the left hand side, I'll click on that actual profile and you can start to see some information about it. This was my target, right, and this is what I actually achieved. So I was going for 6500, it's actually 6508, I got to 6540, really close. My target XY coordinates for my white point, also really darn close. My overall Luminance, I was trying for 120, I got to 119. So you can see how you can compare these and there's lots of things we can do here. We see our gamut curve, we can compare the overall gamut and how these work. So it's actually a pretty sophisticated app, and again, using different calibration apps, like Calman and White Space, they can get uber geeky. But, this is definitely a setup I recommend. - Cause this wasn't geeky enough? (laughs) - I know, but this is a setup I can definitely recommend. This is from Xrite and this is the i1 Pro Spectrophotometer, but you know there's other meters out there from Datacolor and others, and they're all gonna have sort of their own software solutions. As we've said several times, this is sort of a great way to get into managing the color pipeline on your computer monitor. - Alright, well let's take one more look at some closing thoughts, and some parting advise on how to get more out of these types of systems, and who really needs them.

Contents