calibrating PS and windows picture viewer?

[rhodesy]

What is the best way to calibrate my screen, PS cs2 and windows picture viewer so I get the same colours and brightness in my images. I thought i had calibrated PS using the gamma correction tool wizard thing but now everything in PS is a lot darker - and probably better in general than windows picture viewer. However when i spend time in PS adjusting my renderings etc. and then save it as a jpeg for a client and then open it in windows viewer to check it the colours look really garish. What was nice red brick textures come out pink and my skys have increased levels of cyan all in all the image looks a lot worse and less realistic which is quite annoying after hours of rendering and PS. :cry:

So any help on easing this problem would be much appreciated.

Cheers,
Rob

[malindis]

Hi Rob,

Have you changed anything in the PS colors setting (using a particular color profile)......

What I have done is buying a monitor calibration device like the LaCie Blue eye, to calibrate my monitor... After that, a lot of my color problems where solverd...

Cheers

[prayas]

Hi Rob,

Spyder2 is half that price and work good for me. If it's just your screens you have to calibrate the spyder is more than enough. The software i easy and works on both - Mac and PC.

Cheers
Rob

[rhodesy]

Thanks guys. I changed the colour profile to monitor and that fixed the discrepancy (which makes sence). I don't have any control over the final output anyway so hope it turns out ok!

With these monitor calibrators should they give you a universal calibaration result so your screen is as close as it can get to a professional printers screen (assuming they have correctly calibrated screens and then printers to go with those screens). Or does it just match your screens so your laptop should be the same as your desktop etc? Can you pack up your icc profile and send it with your file for print? Do all calibrators give the same result (or close)? the spyder2express seems reasonably priced if it can help replicate what your looking at on other people screen or printer then it sounds like a usefull piece of kit!