13 November 2009

How To Calibrate Your Monitor


Calibrating your monitor means adjusting your monitor and PC/Macintosh to make sure the colours of your photos are displayed correctly. Prints on paper should look the same as the photo displayed on screen.
An easy solution is to calibrate you monitor manually. The problem is that people are not too good at judging colours. Minute changes in colour will go unnoticed because your brain constantly adapts to its surroundings. We know that a sheet of paper is white, so that paper will be seen as white, even though the light falling on it could be slightly red or blue.

Because the human brain works that way, it is very difficult to calibrate your monitor using your eyes only. A better solution is to use monitor calibration tools. These tools usually consist of software and hardware. The sofware displays various different colour hues on the monitor. The calibration hardware is attached to the monitor so it detects these colours and passes on information about the displayed colour to the software. The software detects the changes between the colour displayed and the intended colour to be displayed. After the calibration procedure the software generates an ICC profile. This ICC profile is used by Windows or MAC OS X to render colours correctly on screen.

Calibrators discussed on the photo course where:
 Printer calibration is also possible, but only necessary when you use your own printer.


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