Calibrating Display

[Ganesh H Shankar]

calibration_chart_bg_cccccc.jpg (66.77 KiB) Viewed 18727 times

We often get/make comments about increasing/decreasing contrast/brightness etc. Our recommendations will be incorrect if we don't have a reference to talk about them. So the first step is to calibrate the display. The best solution is to buy a hardware display calibrators (X-rite/Spyder etc). If you don't have one there are monitor calibration softwares - Adobe ships one with its Photoshop suit and there are a few public domain softwares. The software (only) based solutions are not very accurate but is definitely better to use than leaving the display uncalibrated. We have just added a calibration chart at the end of the image page now to let you decide whether your display needs calibration. There are 4 rows each of grey, red, green and blue and each containing 16 different shades. If you can't see them all then your display needs calibration. What you see on your display is different than what others see on theirs for the same image. Your views about contrast/brightness will not be accurate.

Here is a (not very scientific) approximate simple method to calibrate.

1. Open an image (or this page itself) and look at the calibration chart displayed (above) -
If you don't see all 16 shades properly then

- Set the color temperature at 6500K or sRGB (using controls on your LCD/CRT display)
- Set the contrast of your display at 100%
- Set the brightness at 0
- Start increasing the brightness such that you still see the all 16 different shades in each band and brightness level is comfortable for your eyes.
This probably may happen some where around 50+% of brightness control
- If you have knobs to control colors separately (R,G,B) tweak them to make sure the top grey band remains grey - no color cast seen in the grey band.
- Save all settings
- Repeat this procedure once a month.

Please note this procedure will not give you accurate calibration but is far better than using un-calibrated display.

Hope you find this useful.

[vinaya]

Hello,

how do i change these in mac book ?

i am seeing 1st two boxes are complete black for all colors and for red and green,seeing last 2 boxes has one box

vinaya

[Ganesh H Shankar]

All those bands should be distinctly visible. Otherwise what you see is not what others see. Best solution is to use a hardware calibrator. Software calibrators are available too (not very accurate though). I think Adobe PS suit comes with one. I use h/w calibrator.

You may want to surf to find more.

[Rahul Parekh]

Dear Ganesh,

Just received my monitor from engineer after fixing the display problem. So wanted to check the accuracy of the colours . Thank you for sharing Calibrating chart. Set the brightness & contrast and now can see all 16 shades of four bands .

Though, a question. Why we need to do calibrating procedure every month? What's the reason behind this? Can you suggest reliable software & hardware to complete this task?

Thanking you,

Sincerely,
Rahul Parekh

[Ganesh H Shankar]

Rahul,

Overtime characteristics of monitor changes - so you need to keep it calibrated often. There are several hardware calibrators available in the market. You may explore brands like X-rite or Spyder hardware calibrators which comes with the needed s/w to keep your display calibrated.