I am a keen, but very much amateur photographer. I'm one of those people who can't get my prints to match my monitor, so whenever I print, I end up spending an hour (okay, maybe it's only 15 minutes, but it feels like an hour) tweaking curves in Photoshop in order to get a print that looks the way I want it to. Needless to say, by then the "thing" on my screen looks horrible.
I have in the past bought a Spyder 3 and tried to profile my old Dell monitor. No use. I've probably been doing somethng wrong, despite having spent numerous hours reading material that is way beyond my comprehension. And that's probably the core of my mistake - it's not that I haven't tried to educate myself, it's that I've tried to prep for a a marathon before I could crawl.
I've bought a new monitor - NEC Spectraview Reference 271w (I believe it's called SV in the States) and a Color Munki Photo. Both are sitting in their boxes in the living room. While I'm keen to get my new flashy monitor operational and start to print soft-proofed pictures, I'm also worried. Worried about things still not working right. Worried about spending hours going through motions I have read about but still not understand completely, only to be full of buyer's remorse and wonder why on Earth I spent all this money on something that is clearly too good for me.
So I'm looking for advice. Can anyone recommend a fairly simple article/process/guide to get me up and running? As I said, my problem is not that I don't want to educate myself, my problem is that I tend to get dragged into details that are too deep for me.
Thanks in advance