Hi

I'm confused!! Am trying to calibrate my system for preparation of color photos for offset printing (book) and am stuck between two different approaches that give very different results, particularly in the shadows.

I have an old but good Dell Ultra 21 inch flat screen CRT monitor running Photoshop CS3 and a Colorvision Spyder in WinXP. The Colorspace I am using is Adobe 1998.

My monitor manual says just set the monitor to the default settings before runnning the Spyder. But when I do this and run the Spyder I can barely see any difference in the black test strip (which implies I should custom boost the brightness until I can see a difference between the four black boxes).

It is a problem because I do a lot of micro adjustments in Photoshop to the colors and fiddling around with the levels in the shadows. Shadows that looked just right according to the custom settings + Spyder combo yesterday seem overexposed and blotchy after I recalibrated my monitor using the default settings + spyder today (yes I know that the Colorvision Spyder is not the ideal calibration tool... but assume it is better than nothing, right?)

The confusion kicks in when I try to figure out if I have to go back and readjust the photos that looked great before but awful now so they look good again according to the new calibration settings or not? Maybe this would just make everything worse?

Black point, white point and middle grey is no problem as I just do this according to the numbers - using threshold to identify where to make the measurments. It is the subtle fine tuning of the other colors and shadows that is the problem.

Unfortunately I am not in a position to do a sample print to compare with the monitor display. So what should I do? Use the spyder with the monitor default setting. Custom adjust the brightness? Or try some other strategy?

I would also be interested to hear from anybody who can predict what problems I may encounter by preparing photos on a PC for a Mac printing house. Should I expect the conversion of my tiff files from my PC to their Macs to have an impact on levels in the shadows?