Monitor Calibration and Soft Proofing

My tutor had mentioned monitor calibration on one of my earlier assignment reports, and although I tried to do it manually (on my previous monitor), it just resulted in turning the brightness down to a level that was uncomfortable for every day use. I gave up on the idea, and gave it no more thought until I received the feedback for my final assignment, where my tutor again mentioned monitor calibration, as the images I was sending to him were darker than they ideally should have been, and he thought it was probably a calibration issue.

With the final assignment done, it is time to start preparing for assessment, which will include making prints. I realised that if I didn't tackle this monitor calibration issue once and for all, my prints were not going to come back from the printer looking how I expected.

Doing some research on calibration, it transpired that there were devices available that could assess the output of my monitor, then automatically calibrate it to the international standard. Although not cheap, these devices seemed to be the way to go for best accuracy and ease of use. I bought the Spyder 5 Pro device, with which I was successfully able to calibrate my monitor.

Upon further research I found that although my monitor was now calibrated, due to the differences in monitors and paper in terms of the type of medium and the gamut of colours they can both display, what I saw on my screen was not entirely what would exit the printer. I then learned about soft proofing; a way to replicate in imaging software (such as Lightroom) what the printed image would look like on a particular paper. I then found out that for each type of paper a colour profile could be downloaded, and used in the software for soft proofing purposes. The idea is that after your initial post-processing, in the soft proofing view you can make further adjustments to get the printed version to look as close to the screen version of the image as possible. As I intend to get my images printed at Peak Imaging, I downloaded a profile from their website.

A video I found helpful to learn about soft proofing, colour space, and Lightroom's print module can be found here: https://youtu.be/4c-Bu8St3L8?list=PL9AWoB63rwxY7AHhQv64VJrjfhQppyiZm