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Published on November 16th, 2012 | by Kira

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Col­or­Mun­ki Smile: Show Your True Col­ors

There is noth­ing worse than tak­ing an im­age and hav­ing it come up on your screen look­ing very dif­fer­ent than what you are look­ing for. If your com­put­er's col­or cal­i­bra­tion is off it will ef­fect all the im­ages you put out there. And while not ev­ery­one who us­es a cam­era is as ex­pe­ri­enced with col­or cal­i­bra­tion as some of us at Tru­lynet, most peo­ple like to have their im­ages look as nice as they can with as lit­tle ef­fort as pos­si­ble, es­pe­cial­ly when you'll be print­ing them.

This is why the Col­or­Mun­ki Smile is the per­fect col­or cal­i­bra­tion so­lu­tion for the lay pho­tog­ra­pher or hob­by­ist- ba­si­cal­ly, any­one who hasn't both­ered do­ing it in the past. This mon­i­tor pro­fil­ing and cal­i­bra­tion pack­age from X-Rite is made for ease. It re­al­ly is as sim­ple as plug and play. Mere­ly place the sen­sor on your screen where it sug­gests and fol­low the sim­ple com­mands. You do not need to know any­thing about white bal­ance, col­or cal­i­bra­tion, or col­or tem­per­a­ture at all to make this work, and it does a sur­pris­ing­ly good job with both LCDs and LEDs. I test­ed it out and af­ter a few min­utes my mon­i­tor looked great and I could see the con­sis­ten­cy when I did a few test prints and post­ed a few new im­ages on Face­book. When I checked over the im­ages on dif­fer­ent com­put­ers that had al­so been cal­i­brat­ed, the im­ages looked nat­u­ral and ac­cu­rate. Grant­ed, for small­er res­o­lu­tions or ba­sic snap­shots, you won't no­tice much dif­fer­ence.

And an­oth­er word of warn­ing, if you are a pro­fes­sion­al pho­tog­ra­pher/cin­e­matog­ra­pher that cares about hav­ing a lit­tle more con­trol over your com­put­ers set­tings you will need to in­vest in a pro­fes­sion­al grade cal­i­bra­tor to get the pre­ci­sion you are look­ing for. X-Rite makes sev­er­al, and we ac­tu­al­ly tried one of the big broth­er, orig­i­nal mod­el out years ago. How­ev­er, if you don't need a lot of bells and whis­tles and are sim­ply look­ing to make your im­ages look they way you want them- to even for your game to ap­pear as the pro­gram­mers in­tend­ed- the Col­or­Mun­ki Smile does the trick.

I am a lit­tle an­noyed that one still needs to buy a col­or cal­i­bra­tor for his/her mon­i­tors; it's a re­quire­ment for de­sign­ers and dig­i­tal artists. But it's nice to fi­nal­ly have an in­ex­pen­sive op­tion- the Col­or­Mun­ki Smile is quite rea­son­ably priced (as cal­i­bra­tors go) at $90. For a quick fix, we think it is worth the in­vest­ment; es­pe­cial­ly, when it is not a ter­ri­ble idea to check your col­ors ev­ery month or so.

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About the Author

Former neuroscientist, and now fashion photographer, Kira is a perfect fit for TrulyNet. She has a great understanding of what is hot, loves the new geeky toys, and has the academic background to be opinionated on it. Kira is well traveled, has lived in Australia and Canada for school. Loves the outdoors, biking, all types of art, and is completely obsessed with fashion and photographing it. She presently can be found in New York City at an art event, art gallery, museum, science talk, one of the NYC parks, a vegetarian friendly restaurant, a comic book store, or out getting bubble tea. She is a little obsessed with bubble tea.


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