[singlepic id=113 w=400 float=right]Many people never need to worry about calibrating their monitors. Spreadsheets, games and dvd are very forgiving. In fact, calibration is simply a matter of adjusting the various setting to one’s taste. Done. But if you are the creator of media the story changes. There is more to a monitor’s colors than meets the eye. The reason is that there has to be consistency across other people monitors, printers and other forms of output. When you create an image on your screen, you want to have a certain amount of confidence of what it will look like when others see it. So I’ve written this short introduction to color calibration. This is by no means definitive. Just the basics.

The least you need to know:

To start with we need something for a base line. Actually, any picture will work. But depending on the picture, results will vary. If you don’t remember anything else about calibrating, remember this: print a picture on your printer and then adjust you monitor until it look as as bad as the picture. Done.

That’s all there is to it. But like most things in life, easier said that done. Right?

A little theory:

Before I go any farther let me explain why the above explanation works. If you adjust you monitors setting so that it looks like the printed picture, theoretically any changes you make to the picture’s color setting in the computer will be reflected the next time you print the photo again. I say theoretically, because even though this basically works in practice, without a dedicated hardware calibration system it’s still somewhat of an art and takes practice to really SEE the the colors and shades on your screen the way they really are. Our eyes are amazing instruments that can adjust in the blink of an eye (ha ha…good pun james). So calibration takes training too. Don’t get frustrated if at first you don’t succeed.

I’ll get to the meat of calibrating in a moment, but first, let me talk a little more about monitors. All monitors are not created equal. Sometimes we buy a monitor because it has an astronomical contrast ratio and it’s super bright, thinking that more is better. And for some application it is. For example…gaming. A bright monitor with a high contrast ration mean that you can see all the details in the shadows if you want to, and the black can be very black. But the high contrast ratios can also make calibration a headache, because that contrast doesn’t work on paper, or on every monitors. So you have to reign in the contrast and brightness.

Another aspect that needs to be considered concerning monitors are various default setting. The Asus monitor I work on at work has 5 modes: Standard, Theater, Game, Night View and Scenery. I’m going to say as a general rule that you should use Standard mode. But you are welcome to play with the various modes to see what works best. I would think you should especially want to stear away from modes like game modes. These modes, as I said before, play with the brightness and contrast so that you can see into details in the shadows.

One more thing, it would be best to have the monitor in a place where there is consistence lighting, and little of it. In other words, in front of windows or beside windows is not a great place. The ambient light in the room will effect how you see the colors on the screen.

Down to details:

In order to give ourselves the best chance for success possible, we need a picture that shows a very wide range of colors. We want something that shows true white, true black and many shades of gray in between. We want to see what to see some detail in shadows and detail in highlights. Sounds like a tall order. Well I have just the thing.

For that I suggest getting this picture made available by the wonderful and talented Ann Torrence. Download it to your computer and print it out at on your printer at the best quality you have available. Alternately, you can have it printed at you favorite photo lab, or even view it a different monitor that you want to match. The idea is that you want to have two items to compare, the before and the after.

Now the fun part. ( I say that with sarcasm in my voice.) We need to adjust the monitor to look like the picture. This will take some trial and error. For one thing, there is light emitting from the monitor that is not emitting from the picture so a little bit of this is subjective.

What do you see:

Study the picture. Both in the print version and on the screen.

• Can you see a clear delineation of each step of the gray bar on the left hand side? You should.
• Look into the shadows. Under the stone arch and the pant leg of the cowboy. How much detail can you see in the shadows?
• Look at the basic colors, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black, Red, Blue. Do they look accurate or are they shifted? (this takes practice.)
• Look at the skin tones. Do they look correct?
• Look at the highlights. Is there detail in the highlights or is it blown out? As far as I can see there are really no highlight that are blown out. Even the light above the hair has some detail. There are a couple of specular highlight…the catch lights in the eyes and one spot on the Ferris wheel.

Adjusting the contrast and brightness of your monitor you can fix most of these problems. It takes trial and error, but eventually you will come up with setting that seem about right. You might also need to adjust the RGB levels to account for color shift. Again, it’s a matter of just trial and error until you can match the computer screen to the target.

A lot of monitors now days are too bright. So the brightness needs to be turned way down. I have the brightness on my Asus turned down to 50% and It still might be a bit too bright. Usually this doesn’t apply to laptop monitors that have to run on batteries.

Well that’s about it:

I’m no expert. This is just what has worked for me. I even purchased a hardware calibrator, and after I did. I have still used these methods to make small adjustment.

Let me know if this helps, or if I’ve missed something. I’m happy to revisit this subject, to go into further detail or correct errors I may have made.