Pixiq

All digital devices respond to color in unique ways. The computer may control colors in very precise ways, but how those colors are interpreted and displayed on screen (or on paper) are not consistent. For example, a monitor straight out of the box might have a bias for a certain color. You might try to remove the color cast you see, but if this only exists on the monitor, adjusting for that color imbalance will result in other colors becoming too strong. The “removal” of a color cast on the monitor can actually make a color cast appear in the print! If this occurs, you now have to try to get rid of a color problem you can’t see on the monitor—that can make for very frustrating printing.

The monitor may naturally display one color “better” than others, resulting in a bias for that color. Adjusting an image on this screen means you are adjusting colors out of balance with each other, even if they really are not. The results will be a print with out-of-balance colors, even though they look fine on the monitor—again, trying to make a good print in this situation is a real time waster.

But calibration does not guarantee a good print. It just means you can trust your working environment—the monitor—to be predictable and accurate. A good print requires a lot more than this, but monitor calibration means you can get to good and better prints more rapidly and with much less frustration.

Monitor calibration today is easy to do—buy a package of calibration software and hardware. The hardware measures the actual performance of the monitor for different colors. And after you do a few small adjustments, the software pretty much does the work for you.

There are a number of calibration packages on the market from several manufacturers, including Pantone, Datacolor, and X-Rite. The bottom line on these is that they all work. All of them will make your monitor’s display more consistent and dependable. Some offer more precision in how they deal with colors, which may or may not be appropriate for you. Some people find one brand or another works better with certain monitors, but this does not seem to be consistent enough to definitively state that one product is superior to the others.

You need to calibrate your monitor regularly. CRT monitors, which offer the best display for the cost, drift more quickly and need calibration more often. LCD monitors are more stable and need less frequent adjustments. It is hard to clearly state how often to calibrate your monitor. The frequency is highly dependent on how much the power is left on and how frequently it is displaying images. A monitor that is on constantly from morning to night, and in use the entire time, may need to be calibrated a couple of times a month for a CRT monitor, or once a month for an LCD. But if your monitor is only on at night a couple of times a week, it might not need to be calibrated for several months.

NOTE: Certain photos—such as a soft-focus, foggy, or misty scene—will not have a strong black and will actually look worse if you try to force it.