How to Correct Color?

[bep207]

I have a Macbook Pro hooked up to a 20" cinema display.
When viewing pictures in Aperture there is a HUGE difference in color, contrast, etc... between the pictures on the MBP screen and the pictures on the Cinema display.

What is the best and most budget-conscious way to get these two monitors to look the same, and similar to what they would look like if printed?

Thanks for your help
Blake

 

[mkrishnan]

I'm not sure I understand you...

System Preferences -> Displays (pane) -> Color (tab) -> Calibrate (button).

Turn on the advanced features. You should pretty much always do this for any monitor that was not pre-calibrated.

So you'll be doing it twice -- once per screen.

Even then I guess it's good to do in the sense that your eyes are unique, and so your calibration might be slightly different than one done by another person or by a computer. You can save multiple calibrations for each display, too, so you can go back and forth.

As the screen materials age over time and the bulb dims and so on, you should re-do this periodically....

But that answer was fairly obvious... did you mean that you tried this and it didn't work?

 

[bep207]

ive tried this many times. individually the monitors look great.
side by side there is an obvious difference between the two.

 

[mkrishnan]

ive tried this many times. individually the monitors look great.
side by side there is an obvious difference between the two.

Hmmm, are you trying them at the same time, in the same room, under the same lighting conditions? If OS X will let you, try to run the calibrator on both of them literally at the same time, right next to each other, so that you're doing each step on both monitors and then proceeding to the next step?

Alternatively, you might try SuperCal.

The next step up is going to involve hardware... but you should at the very minimum be able to get fairly close with either SuperCal or the basic calibration software in OS X. If your colors are "way off" on the two monitors after calibrating them side-by-side in the same room....you're doing something wrong. If they're slightly different, but the slight difference is important in your work, then it's just possible you do need to step up to using special hardware to co-calibrate them....