If this is covered already I appologize.

I have been experiencing problems with my images. The JPGs I save out as sRGB look fine to me, but when sent to a friend, a pro, he says they are over saturated, with lots of colour noise. Which I do not see. so I am working on getting my monitor right before sending any more rejected stock images.

I recently bought a wide gamut 27" dell display. I am told my Spyder express is useless (to be honest never thought it made a jot of difference!) and to invest in something better, colorMunki or some such. Pricey, is it worth it? No I am no pro, yes I want to sell images. What are the best options here?

I have also read rather alot about windows Vista stuffing up colour profiles on startup? Was never this hard with Kodachrome was it?

Thanks in advance.

I would start by posting a few test images somewhere online and then looking at them with another monitor so you can see how different they actually are in terms of saturation etc. Best to judge them with your eyes compared to someone else as you know how the original is supposed to look. Everyone sees things differently.

Someone can correct me if I'm wrong but I'm pretty sure the latest Spyder Elite software is compatible with wide gamut monitors. After calibrating you should notice a pretty big difference with the before/after test. I have been using a Spyder Elite for the past couple years and it has served me well for print and web presentation, although I'm not using a wide gamut screen.

That isn't unusual. It is likely he is not viewing them on a calibrated monitor or your monitor isn't calibrated. Images prepared on a wide gamut monitor when viewed on a narrow gamut monitor that isn't calibrated can look oversaturated. I would suggest the problem is on his end if you are truly CONVERTING the images to sRGB (not just assigning sRGB) on a calibrated monitor.

To prevent Vista from messing with your color profiles, turn off User Account Access (UAC). You can Google how to do that for your version of the OS. As long as you aren't on a multi user network, there is zero risk in doing that.

Well, ignoring how the images look on your friend's machine for a moment, if you have not calibrated your own display then you can't really say how the images truly look. A typical Dell wide gamut display straight out of the box, with factory default settings, is almost certainly going to be massively over-bright for image processing work. Depending on other settings it's also not going to be overly accurate for color or contrast, especially in the shadow tones. That's because such a monitor is designed for people who care about video games, web surfing, office applications and watching movies. It's not designed by default for people doing color-critical image work.

As you process your images on a generic consumer monitor with factory settings, it's like looking through glasses smeared with vaseline, covered with color gel filters, and in a room that's full of blinding light. Okay, I'm exaggerating, but you get the point. The difference is more subtle than my analogy, but still potentially quite inaccurate. It doesn't matter as long as it's only you looking at your own images for enjoyment. But as soon as you want to share with others, submit to stock agents, or send out jobs to third-party printing services, color management becomes something you will really need.

There was a time when most equipment was more or less similar in visual performance (i.e. mediocre) and relatively similar to the sRGB standard. That time is past; there is now far more variability in display performance, and wide gamut displays in particular have changed the game substantially. This means good color management is now more important, since it's less likely for things to look reasonable purely by accident, across an array of equipment.

Calibrating your own display is the first step in any kind of color critical work. Your monitor is your window onto everything you do. As I said up top, if your display isn't calibrated, there's no telling how your images really look. Worrying about how they look on somebody else's monitor or printer, and wondering what you might need to do about it, is premature at this point then.

So yes, I would recommend calibrating your own display with a reasonable package -- definitely not an old Spyder 2, if that's what you've got. I typically recommend the X-Rite Eye-One Display product; I felt the Spyder 3 wasn't as good. I've not tested the Spyder 4 yet. The X-Rite Colormunki would be overkill unless you plan to try printer calibration, which I wouldn't advise unless do your own printing & you're very serious about mastering color management from end-to-end.

There's more to color management than just this, however. Configuring all your software correctly is another key step, as is learning some more about different color spaces (sRGB vs. Adobe RGB vs. ProPhoto RGB vs. printer profiles), and how & when you need to set them & convert between them.

There were problems on Vista many years ago, but the main one that remains can be side-stepped by making sure UAC is disabled, as E.J. mentions.

Here's a couple of older articles published here at NSN to provide some at-a-glance overview notes on calibration & color management.
http://www.naturescapes.net/docs/index.php/category-technical/379-phil-wigglesworth
http://www.naturescapes.net/docs/index.php/category-technical/138-getting-started-with-inkjet-printing

There are also many, many threads covering monitor calibration in the discussion forum archives as well, though of course most of them are specific to certain questions or problems that posters were having. But at a minimum you might want to search for "wide gamut calibration" and read a number of threads on that topic to familiarize yourself with some issues and solutions particularly related to wide gamut displays.

Many people don't need to do that with the release of some Vista updates. I wouldn't do it by default (unless you want to) but keep it in mind if you have the profile issue.

Thanks guys. Having now calibrated, yup with the old spyder express, things look better. Thing is my shots always looked fine here, at work and on my laptop. But then other people did too, including my friends... but now I have at least a good chance to be not far out. I will look at a screen calibration device for wide gamut. Certainly as a non-pro the colorMunki is a bit high.

Thanks again. I ran windows update for my vista machine and it install about 130 updates

The x-rite eye-one that Royce mentions is a good option

Depending on what Spyder you've got, you may need to upgrade your calibration device. The Spyder 2 and some older versions of the Spyder 3 do not support wide gamut displays and will not produce accurate profiles. It's an issue with the hardware colorimeter devices, not something that can be resolved with different software.

Of the models currently on the market, you're looking mainly at the X-Rite Eye-One Display Pro, or the Spyder 4 if you want to stick with that series. As I said, the ColorMunki Photo would be overkill unless you have specific need for printer calibration as well.

Confusingly, X-Rite also makes a product called ColorMunki Display. This is not the Eye-One Display Pro although it may use the same (or similar hardware), and it's also not the original ColorMunki either. The ColorMunki Display is priced a little cheaper than the Eye-One Display Pro and may be a reasonable package for display calibration only, but I've not looked at it yet to find out exactly what it is or how it differs from the other X-Rite products...

The colorMunki display looks OK but I cannot see if it is design or photo oriented. Confusing information as it does not seem much different from the EyeOne pro. Spyder looks OK too... too many options.

My ColorMunki Display came and I have to say it has made quite a difference over the old Spyder. I can even set the luminance now, thanks for the tip.

Good to know, thanks for the update on the ColorMunki Display. I'll have to look at one up close myself at some point to figure out more details about it. From what I've read, the ColorMunki Display now uses the same underlying hardware device as the Eye-One Display Pro but has a simpler software package with it.

BTW the "design" or "photo" designation is only relevant for the original ColorMunki package which used a very different hardware device (a spectrophotometer, rather than a colorimeter) and therefore supported calibration & profiling of a whole range of devices, not just monitors. Depending on what kinds of devices you were interested in, the package was offered in different versions with different software modules. The new ColorMunki Display is mainly related to that original ColorMunki product in using the name "ColorMunki". Since it's mainly for monitors (technically will do projectors also) there isn't really a sense in which you'd need different versions of it...