Last month I talked about getting color right on your output device and how to select output color profiles for printing. I assumed you had your color workflow environment all set up for managing color and maintaining color consistency throughout your editing process. However, if you haven't started with monitor calibration, then proper selection of color profiles only gets you halfway toward a good color managed workflow. So this month, I'm going to backtrack a little and talk about getting your monitor set up for managing color.
Most people who do any kind of photo editing use the Adobe Gamma Control Panel (Windows) or the Display Calibrator Assistant (Mac OS X) to calibrate a monitor. The calibration of your monitor is something you do to bring the monitor color temperature close to natural daylight and eliminate any colorcasts on your viewing device.
Unfortunately, neither Adobe Gamma nor Display Calibrator Assistant does a very good job to adjust brightness and eliminate colorcasts - especially with many new LCD type monitors.
In years past you'd have to spend a lot of money to purchase a hardware device to calibrate your monitor. However in recent years, monitor calibration devices have come down in price and now amateur photographers and photo enthusiasts can purchase a monitor calibrator for much more affordable prices.
In Figure 1, you see the Eye-One Display 2 from
GretagMacbeth. This unit was touted as a low cost calibration tool for some time, but at $249 was just a little out of reach for the non-professional.
Figure 1
More recent developments by Pantone/GretagMacBeth and ColorVision have provided us with very low cost calibration units. These monitor calibrators are now selling as low as $69 at Amazon.com and other resellers.
The
Huey from Pantone/GretagMacBeth (Figure 2) is a calibration unit designed to set your monitor brightness and correct your screen for colorcasts for LCD, CRT, and laptop displays. Huey also adjusts for changes in ambient light fluctuations.
Figure 2
The
ColorVision Spyder2express (Figure 3) performs similar adjustments as the Huey but doesn't have the option for changing ambient light changes automatically.
Figure 3
Either unit provides you a much better calibration than you can hope to achieve with the software tools provided by Adobe and Apple. For as little as $69, a hardware unit is an affordable device that can help you achieve much better results when preparing photos for printing.
The devices are easy to use. You load the software and place the unit on your monitor as you see in Figures 1 and 3. Adjustments are made automatically without any user intervention. Regardless of your level of expertise in using a computer, you'll find calibrating your monitor with one of these devices to be both easy and intuitive.
One caveat in using these calibration devices on LCDs and laptops is the adjustment for the overall brightness of your monitor. If you use an LCD monitor or laptop computer, you'll need to adjust your overall monitor brightness. Just take a photo print output to your desktop printer and hold it up next to your monitor. Use your monitor display controls or the display control panel (Windows) or preferences (Mac OS X) to adjust the brightness to match your print. As you make an adjustment, let your eyes adjust to the new setting before moving the brightness slider again. At first your monitor may appear too dark, but after your eyes adjust to the new setting the monitor will appear brighter.
Loading a monitor profileThe end result of running a calibration is the creation of a monitor color profile. The monitor profile is a data file that is saved automatically to your hard drive at the end of the calibration process. In Windows you may need to physically load the profile after calibration. Open the Control Panels folder and double click Display. Click the Settings tab and click the Advanced button. Click the Color Management tab (Figure 4). If you don't see your new monitor profile appearing in the Color Management tab click the Add button. Locate the saved profile and add it in the Color Management tab.
Figure 4
On the Mac in OS X, verify your profile is active by opening the Display Preferences. Click Color and you should see all the monitor color profiles available on your system. The current loaded profile appears as the selected profile in the list (Figure 5).
Figure 5
Color profiles are used to maintain color consistency throughout your workflow. You use a monitor color profile, a workspace profile, and an output profile to manage color. Essentially what happens is color is converted from one profile to another in an effort to keep color consistent throughout the process and ultimately at print time.
One point to remember is that a monitor color profile is automatically loaded by your system at startup. This profile is not something you use within a software program like Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. It's automatic and you don't touch it after your computer starts. As a matter of fact, you may see your monitor brightness change during startup. That's because the monitor profile kicked in when you booted your computer.
When you work with a program like Photoshop or Elements, you select a working color profile. This is usually a choice between sRGB or Adobe RGB (1998). In either program you visit the Edit > Color Settings and decide which colorspace you use for editing your images. What happens is that color is converted from your monitor space using your monitor color profile to your workspace. This conversion attempts to fit all viewable color from your monitor with an accurate translation to the same colors (or as close as possible) to your workspace color.
When you print a picture to your desktop printer, color is again converted to your output color profile. (See my article last month where I talked about desktop color printing). Again, an effort is made to reproduce the color you see on your monitor in your workspace color to closely match your desktop printer's color.
What colorspace should you use for your working space? Generally, people recommend using sRGB for screen images and Adobe RGB (1998) for printing. Unfortunately following this rule doesn't always work. There are too many exceptions to the rule. But that's all subject for another article.
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