Getting “It” Right For Better Photographs:

Calibrating & Profiling Your Monitor

What do I mean by calibrating and profiling your monitor?

Your monitor is the primary device you rely on to show you the colors of your photographs or other artwork on your computer. today’s monitors are primarily flat screens and my use various technologies for displaying images.

Unfortunately monitors, even the really good ones, are not totally stable and need to be profiled every one to four weeks. Also, you should probably replace a monitor you’re using for critical color work after about five years.

Oh, by the way you really need to understand this... a monitor that is properly calibrated and profiled for color will not be as bright and punchy as one you might use for gaming or watching movies. But then you’re reading this blog because you want accuracy... right?

The process is easily defined and done well with a little more effort. Calibrating & profiling is basically setting your monitor to it’s factory standard and having your computer tell it how to correctly and accurately display color and density.

There are ways of doing this using only a combination of your eyes and software (like the calibration function in Apple’s Displays Preference Panel or with Adobe Gamma on Windows). Sometimes this works fine but it’s not totally consistent. There are other methods that are more accurate but require a hardware investment.

The next step up is using a “Colorimeter” - a hockey puck like device that you place on your monitor that works with software to build a Lookup Table (LUT) that will (hopefully) generate the correct colors on your monitor. There are several such devices available like the Huey, Eye-One Monitor, and the Spyder. These will range in price from under $100 to about $300 and will do an ok job.

If you want to do the job right, you’ll want to invest in a spectrophotometer like the Eye-One Spectrophotometer, the ColorMunki or the Spyder3. These devices not only read light transmitted by your monitor, but have their own light source and can create custom paper profiles for your printer (more about that later). These devices are not inexpensive, running between $300 - $1500.

Using either the colorimeter or spectrophotometer is pretty easy - start the software and follow the on-screen instructions. The software will automatically tell applications like Photoshop which monitor profile to use.

The next step is to learn about “color space” and ow to set up your applications to use it. It’s really not as intimidating as it sounds and we’ll cover it next time.

I have created a number of video tutorial CDs covering this topic in detail as well as many other Photoshop & Lightroom subjects. These CDs are available at http://www.chbphoto.com - click on the the “Tutorial CDs" button.

You can add your comments and questions. I’ll be happy to answer them. The idea is to just enjoy and learn.