New to calibration, help Needed

_T_ said:

You can achieve the same improvement by looking at a print, analyzing what you don’t like about it, making an educated guess at adjustments in software and printing it again.

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It's kind of nice though to be able to skip the 'printing it again' step. That's where calibration makes sense. Virtually all of my inkjet prints are the way I want them to be in a single pass. Only on very rare occasions (usually with colors near the edges of the gamut) I'll make adjustments and print again. Without profiling of the monitor and the printer, this is a whole lot more difficult to accomplish.

It just saves time, paper and ink. What's not to like about that?

You can spend a bunch of money and time and effort calibrating everything, or you can make a bunch of prints and look at them and let your eyes and brain calibrate themselves automatically to the results.

If you were going to make the prints anyway this is basically free.

Sure.

Some people walk the full shopping cart to their homes, others load the groceries into the car and drive. One isn't inherently better than the other. It's a personal choice.

I agree with that. All I’m saying is if you’re looking at your process from end to end trying to find places where improvements can be made, one of the places where your efforts will produce the least improvement to the results is calibration.

Ultimately, that's always the case. If you look at virtually all of the technical questions discussed on a forum like this one, the answer might be "forget about all that, let's talk about what you pointed the camera at." But that generally isn't appreciated very greatly.

In a sea of posts encouraging monetary solutions to problems and non problems alike, I’m quite happy whenever I get a chance to suggest to whomever might read my posts at whatever future date that an issue can be solved for free, or better yet isn’t a problem. That’s exactly the kind of help to whatever anonymous searcher I’m glad to provide.

I understand. However, I trust you realize there are two counter-arguments to yours:

1: Your approach isn't free. The process involving test prints consumes paper and ink, and it costs time. How that balances out, of course depends on a host of factors.

2: The line between addressing deeper considerations and basically sidestepping someone's question and going on an off-topic tangent is sometimes thin. In general, people appreciate it to have their questions answered. Besides, when it comes to something like calibration, I'm sure people will generally be able to realize that there's the option to not bother at all. It kind of goes without saying.

Overall, the "you should not want this" argument is always a little iffy. In my mind, it doesn't acknowledge the possibility that someone has decided for themselves what they do want. Perhaps we should just use that as a base assumption - that people are capable of expressing their needs.

And perhaps on that note we should end this off-topic digression.

RalphLambrecht said:

Does anyone know how to calculate the cd/m^2 value from a lightmnetwr's EV value?

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For your Sekonic meter which has the K factor of 12.5 then it EV^2 * .125= cd/m^2 (ISO set at 100). But then I think it has the function to display in cd/m^2 directly doesn't it?