Digital Color: Monitor Calibration 101

As a photographer, color is very important to your business.  It’s also a very complicated and subjective topic.  In this series of articles, we’ll discuss some of the complexities and recommend how you might go about getting a better grasp on the world of digital color.

What is monitor calibration?
When you calibrate your monitor, all you’re trying to do is get it displaying colors as close to the accepted standard as it possibly can.  This helps ensure that other people (such as labs) can see and print your images so they look similar to what you see on your own screen.  That’s not to say every monitor can be made to look exactly alike, though.  Each monitor is different, so variations will always occur.

Should I calibrate my monitor?
As with most things, it depends.  If you are not terribly picky about your colors and have no intention of correcting your own images, then you might want to stay away from the complexities of calibration and color management.  PWD, for instance, has many clients who prefer to spend their time on other photography matters and leave the color and printing to us.  In these cases, the photographers simply send in their out-of-camera images and we take care of the rest.

For those who do correct their own images, however, monitor calibration is crucial.  Correcting on a non-calibrated monitor can result in prints which look nothing like you intended.  If you want your prints to look like the images on your monitor, you absolutely must calibrate that monitor.

How do I calibrate my monitor?
This one is easy to answer because we’re not going to get into too much detail.  There are several calibration devices on the market, and their instruction manuals will tell you all you need to know about how to use them.  These devices are called colorimeters, and they use a combination of hardware and software to read the colors produced by your monitor and make adjustments as needed.  A few examples of these products are the ColorVision Spyder2, the ColorVision Color Plus, Monaco Systems MonacoOPTIX, and Gretag Macbeth Eye-One Display.  At PWD Labs, we use the Gretag Macbeth Eye-One Pro.

Anything else to keep in mind?
There’s always more.  Once you have your monitor calibrated, you should take care to view it under the proper conditions.  A dim, windowless room is best.  You don’t want a lightsource reflecting off your newly calibrated screen and distorting your pretty colors.

Monitors actually take some time to come up to working temperature, so it’s recommended that you leave your monitor on for 30 minutes to an hour before you begin color-sensitive work.

You don’t just calibrate once and forget it.  Calibration should be done at least once a month and even once a week is recommended.

Summary
Many people don’t bother with monitor calibration because they think it’s difficult or unecessary.  In fact, it’s quite easy to setup and use a calibration device, and the process is quite necessary if you do your own editing.  So go get a calibration kit and start calibrating.

Shameless Plug: If you’d rather not worry about things like this, PWD Labs offers a complete array of post-event image services which can remove the post-production burden from you, the photographer.  Just send us your out-of-camera images, we’ll edit and process them to your standards, and we’ll return the final images to you.