Calibrating your monitor

Of course, it’s all very well adjusting your images so that they look right on your monitor, but how do you know your monitor’s producing accurate levels of colour and brightness? The fact is, they generally don’t, and you’ll find there are occasionally large discrepancies between what your monitor displays and what your printer prints. Monitors can sometimes be over-bright (especially LCD displays) and have a strong ‘blue-white’ shift (it looks ‘clean’ but is not accurate). You can calibrate your monitor, though, to produce more accurate colour, either using software utilities like Adobe Gamma (less accurate) or hardware calibration kits (more accurate). The result of both is an ‘ICC’ (International Colour Consortium) profile which corrects your monitor’s colours.

Adobe Gamma

Adobe Gamma is a utility which is installed alongside Photoshop Elements or Photoshop on Windows PCs. (On Mac’s you use the machine’s built-in system preferences for monitor adjustments.) It’s a control panel which can also be used as a step-by-step wizard by novices. Using a series of greyscale and coloured panels which you compare visually, it first prompts you to select the optimum brightness and contrast settings for your monitor, then its overall brightness, or ‘gamma’. These steps are important for making sure you’re not consistently producing images which look either too dark or too light in printouts, or on other users’ machines. You can also check the gamma (brightness) values of the individual red, green and blue colour channels. The next step is very important. Here, you set the ‘white point’ of your monitor in terms of colour temperature. The default is usually a very ‘cold’ 9500 degrees Kelvin, whereas for correct colour you need a temperature of 6500 degrees Kelvin. When that’s done, Adobe Gamma will then create your monitor profile, which is then used by Windows automatically to control the monitor display.

The first step in the Adobe Gamma control panel is to make sure your monitor is set to display its optimum brightness range, from dense blacks to brilliant highlights. It’s important not to lose deep shadow or subtle highlight detail in the displayed image.

You also need to make sure the monitor’s overall brightness level, or ‘gamma’ is correct. You can either do this using a grey pattern to check overall luminance levels, or carry out a more precise adjustment by calibrating the red, green and blue components individually.

Calibration tips

Although colours can be considered in ‘correct’, absolute terms, the way they appear (and hence the way you attempt to compensate for them) on-screen can vary subtly according to the ambient conditions. For example, you should choose a neutral backdrop for your image-editing in order to avoid distorting your eyes’ perception of the colours in the image. The Windows ‘Bliss’ theme is not suitable, nor the Mac’s default blue desktop. It’s essential, too, to carry out your screen calibration in exactly the same ambient lighting you’re going to be working in. Ideally, your monitor will be shielded from ambient light. Lacie makes monitors which come with their own light-shielding hoods, though this isn’t practical for most of us. Once your monitor’s been calibrated, it might look very ‘red’. This is normal. It’s because we’ve spent months or years acclimatising to the blue cast of a standard monitor. Give it a week, and you’ll find you’re once more perceiving your monitor as neutral.