Tune your monitor screen for
pixel-perfect color accuracy in all situations
Whether you get your photos printed
professionally or use your own household printer, it's not unusual to find the
prints you produce often look different from how they appeared while you were
editing them on your Mac. Colors may shift and appear differently, brightness
may increase or decrease, and the problem might get even worse when you send a
photo to a friend and discover their computer displays your photo differently
again. No matter how you print your photos, getting them wrong time after time
is frustrating, time-consuming and expensive, and you multiply the first two by
a factor of ten if you need to wait a few days for each batch of shots to be
delivered.
An
un-calibrated screen can make it hard to spot editing mistakes. Use a
calibrator such as a Color Munki.
The problem lies in the screen you’re using
– or, more precisely, how it’s set up. If you use an Apple display, you can
feel a little smug: Apple’s monitors, from its Cinema displays to the screens
on its MacBook Pros, get consistently good reviews. However, even the best
monitor needs to be set up correctly: if it isn’t, you’re creating disharmony
between the display you use to edit your images and the equipment you use to
print them. By default, many monitors are set up to produce bright, highly
saturated images. This makes screens look fanatics in showrooms, but means your
photos will appear brighter and more richly colored than they really are –
something that only becomes apparent once you’ve spent money on printing them.
The way to avoid producing files with inaccurate colors is to calibrate your
monitor. Essentially, monitor calibration is the process of bringing the
brightness and color settings of your monitor to within certain limits. This
ensures that your monitor screen will display a photograph exactly the same as
any other calibrated monitor. Calibrating a monitor produces a color profile
for your particular monitor that will translate well to the color profile used
by photo printers.
Eye of the beholder
Of course, every monitor – and set of
eyeballs – is slightly different, but monitor brightness and color aren’t something
you measure yourself. Instead, you use a calibrator: a small, photo-sensitive
device that measures the colors emitted by your screen while it displays a test
pattern. It uses these measured values to correct the brightness and color of
your screen. The result? Once you get an image looking right on your screen, it
will display correctly on other people’s calibrated monitors; it will print
reliably, as well, which means less money wasted on bad prints.
Finding a calibrator isn’t necessarily
easy: prices start at about $150 and can become stratospheric for professional
models, and it’s sometimes not clear where the benefits in the price increase
lie. Often, the benefit of spending more money is better software. For example,
Color Munki – whose Display calibrator we’ve used to illustrate this article –
includes software called Digital Pouch with some of its calibrators, which
allows you to send images with specific color profiles to other people, making
sure they’re seeing what you see. It also includes a print simulator called
Print Safe, which allows you to see how your images will look under different
lighting conditions – a useful way of combatting a phenomenon called
metamerism, in which colors appear different depending on the light they’re
viewed under.
Quick look: Calibrating your Mac’s screen
Quick
look: Calibrating your Mac’s screen
1. Half-hour delay
Calibrating a screen that’s just been
turned on could lead to inaccuracies. Leave it on for 30 minutes before you
start the calibration process.
2. ColorMunki
This ColorMunki Display calibrator allows
you to calibrate multiple monitors attached to the same Mac, for faster
system-wide tuning.
3. Ambient light
Ambient light is an important factor to
consider when you’re trying to perfect the color reproduction of your monitor –
make sure that no lights in your room are glaring off your screen when you’re
calibrating.
4. Frequent calibration
Calibration shouldn’t be a one-off affair.
Recalibrating your display frequently will mean it keeps producing accurate
color even as it gets older.
The right tool
Actually using a calibrator is easy. Most
calibrators have small rubber suckers on their undersides, allowing them to
stick to your monitor’s surface. In most cases, calibration software is
designed to be fast and reliable – all you should need to do is load the
software, follow the on-screen instructions, and then twiddle your thumbs while
your monitor flashes through a series of colors. The only thing to beware of is
that the LCD or LED bulbs in a modern monitor can take a while to reach their
normal working brightness. For that reason, you should hold off calibrating a
monitor until it’s been running for around 30 minutes.
Many
screen calibrators work in the background, adjusting your screen’s brightness
as ambient light changes.
One thing that effects how fast a monitor’s
bulbs reach optimum brightness is age. It’s reasonable to expect a decent
monitor to last at least five years, but in that time the amount of brightness
it’s capable of emitting will change. This will happen so gradually you won’t
notice it – but you leave a monitor’s brightness settings untouched it will get
dimmer and dimmer over time, and you might start adding brightness to images
unnecessarily. As a result, it’s common practice for professional photographers
to re-calibrate their displays around twice a month. You don’t necessarily have
to do it that often, but it’s worth bearing in mind if it’s been a while since
you’ve opened iPhoto.
Print test
After you’ve calibrated your monitor for
the first time, it’s a good idea to get a small print made at your favorite
printer as a test run. This way, you can double-check that your changes have
been for the better without the expense of messing up a big A3 print.
Ambient light
“Ambient light” refers to the light sources
in the same room as your Mac other than your monitor. And, just as ambient
light is important when viewing a print, its important when editing photos.
Some take a zero-tolerance approach to
ambient light, but while it’s true that editing in a pitch-black room will give
you the best results, you don’t need to be a zealot. The most important thing
to avoid is direct light hitting your monitor and glaring back at you. This
reduces contrast and makes images look more washed-out than they really are. If
your room has overhead lighting, consider investing in (or making!) a monitor
hood to keep the glare off your screen. If you’re in a room with spotlights,
the job is easier: just turn them so they’re not pointing at the monitor.
Alternatively, if the room you’re editing in has a dimmer switch, use it to
turn down the brightness of the lights before you start editing your shots.
Most calibrators are designed to cancel-out
ambient light, but reducing the brightness of your environment will make your
monitor easier to use day-to-day. Some, such as the Huey Pro ($99), will
measure ambient light every so often and adjust your monitor in response to
changing light conditions – useful if the room your Mac is in is naturally lit.
A display calibrator such as the
ColorMunki allows you to easily tune tour monitor.
