A display color calibrator reads your monitor and sets up a profile to adjust your settings so that you see the truest colors possible. This is important if you do a lot of photography or graphic design, you want to make sure the colors you see and design for are what the final printed product will look like. Of course, there are always fine differences in printers as well, but at least this helps get is closer. If two people look at the same image on different uncalibrated computers, they may see very different colors! Your purple-ish may be my blue-ish. Contrast plays a part here too. I’m sure you can imagine the frustration when a designer and client are having trouble agreeing on a color pallet because they are seeing 2 completely different colors! The problem only compounds further for photographers, for whom color editing can make or break a shot. Spending a good amount of time on a photograph only to find out after its received back from the printer that your colors are off can drive even the most patient artist to madness. Calibrators are supposed to help alleviate some of that stress.

First of all, I chose the pro version because my husband and I both run multiple monitors and this one is supposed to handle that better, as well as measure ambient room light so that you can adjust the calibration when the room light changes. Today I ripped into the package, excited to try it out and see how close my monitors really were. As far as directions, there really aren’t any. an accordion booklet that simply instructs you to insert the CD into your computer. Once I had the CD in I had to hunt for the install icon and launch the program, which launched in Chinese. Yes, a bit frustrating. After randomly clicking buttons I got it to switch to English and start the installation. The prompts ask a series of questions about your monitor and what features it has. While I generally consider myself pretty tech savvy, this part did leave me feeling a bit stupid. Since I have an iMac computer, the options just didn’t seem to fit precisely, but I managed to muddle through. Then we get to the actual calibrations.

The calibration process itself is pretty straight forward, but the hardware itself is lacking. The device comes with a suction cup to hold it to the screen, but tells you not to use it on an LCD screen, only CRT. For the majority of us, this means no suction cup help and we are directed to drape the Spyder over the display and use the counterweight to hold it in place. Counterweight? Hmmm, guess we’ll mark that as a missing part because mine clearly did not include one. I decided I’d hold the cord in the proper place instead to ensure it stayed put, only problem was it didn’t want to lay flat against the screen. Another dilemma, although it was easily solved, I tilted the display back slightly. Of course, this could potentially throw off ambient light readings, so just be careful if you have a bright ceiling light or other direct light source near by. Ok, now that its in place I hit the calibrate button and it goes through a series of colors and reads how they show on my display. At the end of the process it sets the display to the new calibrated settings and gives you the option to compare new versus old.

(below you see the device as it hangs where it would during a calibration)

On my iMac display there wasn’t a huge difference, but I am happy with the results. On to screen number two! I had a bit more issues calibrating the second screen as it kept kicking back a color set that most definitely had a more blueish tint to it. Frustrated with the results I walked away. Later, once I had more patience, I decided to try again. This time I made sure that other light sources in the room, namely the first monitor, were aimed away from the second screen. This time the finished colors were much better. The difference was huge on this monitor and I’m very pleased with the results.

I’m glad I bought this product, but I think there are some design flaws in the hardware itself. The flaws wouldn’t stop me from recommending this to anyone else, but I’d forewarn that a bit of patience may be needed in the initial setup. We’ll see if my husband has the same experience as I plan on giving it to him and see if he can figure it out without my help or directions. Yes, I’m an evil wife… but I have to get my entertainment somehow, right?

The app officially launched today and I got to play with it for the first time. What an addicting game! And of course its always fun to see your work in action. His game is called Guess and Win in 2010. This is a number guessing game, and very addicting. Each time you guess the number right on the first try you move up to the next level. You can post your high scores to a leader board and also post them to your Facebook or Twitter accounts. But the fun doesn’t end there. The high score at the end of 2010 wins actual money! Cold hard cash. The prize starts out at $100 and could potentially reach $20,000 depending on the amount of apps purchased.

The app is only .99, not bad considering you have the chance to win much much more! But watch out, your Web Savvy AppMama plans on dominating the leader boards. Check it out and see if you can keep up! Find out more about the Guess and Win 2010 game here.

Aperture is a nice program and highly revered in the photography world. It makes editing easy and is especially helpful if you enjoy editing RAW photo formats. The photo editing options are endless and too many for me to get into. Taking a simple self photo with my photo booth on my iMac I played around with some of the presets and got a feel for how this would work for amateur person jumping in. Having used Photoshop and Pixelmator the Aperture layout is very different, as well as the workflow. You shouldn’t let this detour you though, it is very easy to navigate. I did have some confusion on how to actually save a project once I was done with my edits, I did manage to discover the export feature which is not very straight forward. I have to say that I find this a great tool for photo editing and does a lot, but I would not say it is a standalone program. I think you’d still want another heftier program like Photoshop to really polish your work.

My husband and I both discovered one major flaw, freezing. We’ve been testing this software on 21.5″ iMac computers that are pretty new (new in Feb 2010). We found that Aperture will spontaneously freeze during a workflow and require a system reboot to allow the computer to work again. I’m a huge Mac fan and have NEVER had any issues with freezing, even when running Parallels and dual operating systems with a gazillion programs. This is my third Mac computer and I can attest to the reliability of the system. So these sudden freezes in Aperture are highly frustrating. We’d expect this from a Microsoft product, not an Apple product. Tsk tsk. A quick search on Google confirms that this is not a issue that only we are having.

So overall, this program has the potential for greatness, but falls short on reliability. We’ll try it again once Apple takes care of the stability issues. Want to try it out for yourself? Check out the 30 day trial at Apple.

Don’t want to take my word for it? Check out this PCWorld review that addresses the Aperture freezing issues.

Adobe has an online color picker called Kuler. When I first saw it I though, “Oh, another color picker. What’s the bog deal?” Then I started playing around with it! The color picker part is like most you find online, the feature I liked the most was the “create from image” option. I popped a picture of my daughter in and ta-da! Color palette! It lets you select a mood which will change the colors it grabs from the picture. How cool is that?!

As someone who takes inspiration for web design from every day objects I can see this handy little site getting a lot of use. Have a favorite printed skirt? Snap a picture and ta-da, instant color palette! Go play and let me know what you think!