SpyderX Pro calibration tutorial – desktop screens (continued)

Part 4: Lights out

At this point, if you haven’t already, turn off the lights or pull the blinds, or whatever. For your best chance of accurate calibration, make your room as dark as possible.

Part 5: Calibration

Tilt the screen back, and use the counterweight on the cord to hang the sensor over the back, so it’s positioned roughly on the diagram on the screen.

Click “Next” to begin the calibration process.

Brightness

The device will take a minute to read black, red, green, blue and white. Then it will pause here:

At the top it will tell you the Target brightness is 120. This is a nonsense in-built target which is too high for everybody, and I wish Datacolor would wise up and change it.

If your screen matches your prints at 120, your office must be lit by football stadium floodlighting, and your power bill must be horrendous!

Don’t worry, what we’re doing here is setting a new target, based on the adjustment you made to your screen before we started.

So your Current brightness reading should definitely be lower than 120. You can see mine is at 98, because my office is quite well-lit. Generally speaking, yours should be between 70 and 100. If so, press “Continue” right away:

(During my testing I found that it made me press “Update” before I could press “Continue”.  I’m not sure if this will happen to you too. It’s no problem if it does.)

BUT … if it’s lower than 70 or higher than 100, I’m sorry, but I kinda need you to stop here, turn your light back on, and go right back to the start, and re-visit your print matching from Part 1. In good light, you really should have a print match somewhere between 70 and 100.

If you can’t be bothered starting over, adjust your screen’s brightness until it’s at approximately 80. That should be a safe area for most people.

IMPORTANT: Don’t forget to hit the “Update” button if you make a brightness adjustment. It will take a moment to re-read, then show you the new number.

Press “Continue” to move on:

Profiling

For about 1-2 minutes, your screen will display a whole range of colours while the device reads and records them:

Once the Spyder has taken all its measurements, remove it from the screen, and press “Finish”:

New target notification

Upon finishing, you’ll almost certainly get this little pop-up:

Don’t be alarmed – it’s a good thing. It’s telling you that your new Brightness target has been recorded in the software, where it will be remembered for you for all subsequent calibrations.

Part 6: Save the profile

On this screen, the Calibration Reminder period should already be set to “1 Month”, because you set it in Preferences earlier.

By default, the profile name field will automatically populate with your computer name, and “-1” at the end. If you allow this naming convention, it will add “-2” when you recalibrate next month, and “-3” the month after that, and so on.

I do not agree with this default setting. There’s really no need to keep old profiles from previous months. So I recommend dropping the “-1” off the profile name:

And each month, use the same file name and save over the old profile. It’s a simple measure to prevent clutter on your computer.

Once you’ve named and saved the profile, you’ll get this enthusiastic message:

Press “Next”.

Part 7: Lights up

Turn your lights back on, or open the blinds, or whatever.

Part 8: Analysis

Here, Datacolor gives us a grid of images to assess the calibration. It’s a completely pointless grid, because we don’t have those prints, do we? To assess the calibration, we need images that we can compare to prints. So immediately press the “Open Custom” button:

The moment of truth has arrived. It’s time to see how your calibration went. Click here to proceed to the analysis page.