How to calibrate your monitor

Sites such as ePaperPress offer some basic visual tests that will immediately show you whether your monitor is properly calibrated.

If you work with images or video, and in particular colour correction, it’s important to make sure your monitor is properly calibrated. After all, you can’t properly assess the colours you’re manipulating if your monitor isn’t displaying them correctly. So what exactly is calibration? Your monitor’s display is made up of red, green and blue pixels, which combine to show every possible colour. There are a number of methods for classifying and displaying colour, depending on whether it’s intended for screen display, print or video. All have technical limitations and things to be aware of when converting from one format to another, but that’s a discussion for another time. Here we’re dealing with a computer monitor that displays colour in RGB and we want to make sure it’s as accurate as possible.

The accuracy is defined by the quality and resolution of the monitor itself, as well as the graphics card in your computer. Regardless of what monitor or graphics card you have, calibration ensures they’re accurate by literally ‘looking’ at the colours and contrast levels displayed, then via software, changing the system settings.

Calibration tools

There are several excellent calibration tools around and they range from affordable to moderately expensive. Most of these are designed for graphics and print work, rather than video; however, since we’re dealing with RGB monitors either way, the differences are negligible.

There are two stages to calibration. The first is to make sure that what you’ve got is properly set up in terms of contrast levels, and black and white points (the gamma). There are simple visual tests you can do to help fix this using free or bundled software tools like Adobe Gamma (see ‘Adjust your gamma’ below).

The second step is to make sure your system is displaying colours correctly. To do this requires a hardware device that will sit in the middle of your display and ‘read’ the monitor as a series of colours is displayed. This digital eye determines whether what the system thinks it’s displaying is in fact what you’re seeing — it will then modify the display coming out of your graphics card to compensate for any anomalies.

There are several such devices available, but the two most often recommended are the X-Rite i1Display 2 (around $300), widely used in professional circles, and the Spyder3Express ($125), which is the more popular for its price and quality. Spyder makes several models up to the Elite ($315), which is the one we used for testing. You can see this in action in the video tutorial on this month’s cover disc.

Adjust your gamma

To quickly check your monitor’s calibration, visit http://epaperpress.com/monitorcal or http://www.imaging-resource.com/ARTS/MONCAL/CALIBRATE.HTM. These sites offer some basic visual tests that will immediately show you whether your monitor is properly calibrated. You can fix this to some extent by adjusting your graphics card control panel or using a software tool like Adobe Gamma, which comes with Photoshop. For more intensive calibration, though, one of the tools mentioned here is required.

Calibrate your eyes

Notwithstanding vision impairment issues, it’s important that the room you’re working in maintains a consistent ambient light and that when you calibrate your monitor, it’s under the same conditions you’ll be using it. It’s also a fact of nature that your eyes adapt and adjust to changing light conditions. This includes the monitor itself, which is after all a light source. So as the image on the screen changes and you focus on it for any length of time, your eyes become gradually unreliable. It’s worthwhile looking away from the monitor around the room every few minutes to let your eyes readjust.