Graffiti at Treasure Hill, Taipei.

A week or so ago, I tweeted that I was about to (re)calibrate my monitor. It’s something I’ve been doing regularly for a few years now in order to ensure that the photographs I’m working on are color correct. One of the replies I got was from someone saying that they didn’t know it was possible to calibrate a monitor, so for this phototip, let’s take a look at monitor calibration.

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Color management is an entire field of its own and monitor calibration is an essential first step. It doesn’t matter what you do later in terms of print profiles and color spaces, without a properly calibrated monitor your photos won’t be color accurate. If you have any plans at all to print your work, or to license it in any way, monitor calibration is a step that you must take. Colors can be described as device dependent, in that what you see as blue (for example) on one monitor might appear as a different shade of blue on another. Calibrating the monitor ensures that the blue will display the same across all calibrated devices.

The bad news is that you cannot calibrate a monitor just by looking at it. Sure, you’ll have brightness and contrast controls and probably a few other options to adjust your monitor, and you can use Display Calibrator Assistant on a Mac or Adobe Gamma on Windows to get a slight improvement, but it’s not going to be enough to ensure dependable and accurate color.

The good news is that there are now a number of affordable, easy-to-use hardware options available that will accurately calibrate your monitor for you. Calibration devices available include offerings by X-Rite (Gretag Macbeth) and Datacolor. These companies produce hardware devices known as colorimeters that accurately measure the actual colors on the monitor rather than the subjective ones that your eye sees.

I won’t go into specifics about how each works, but essentially you place the colorimeter on the screen and it can then measure both the colors of the monitor and the ambient room lighting to ensure that your colors are accurate and consistent. If you don’t have some kind of monitor calibration device, make sure that it is the next photography-related purchase you make. If you do have one, when was the last time you used it? Why don’t you calibrate your monitor now?

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