Calibrating Your Monitor

Monitor Calibration is basically making your screen look like it would appear on paper. This is topic that comes up from time to time but it's not something you think about when getting into photography. Honestly it's tough, there are so many monitors out there, it's hard to make an image look great on everything. One monitor it'll be too blue, or colors are off, one it might be bright and one dark. You have to do the best you can and knowing your monitor isn't the one that's off gives you some confidence your images are they best the can be. When you start printing images for yourself or clients or anything else, you really see the difference if your monitor is not calibrated correctly. I see a difference going from my Macbook Pro to my Dell Desktop even though both are LCD's. My desktop was out of service for a while, but since I added some new parts, big ol' monitor, and Windows 7(which is really great), I have started to use it again along with my apple laptop. So I had to find a way to calibrate them.

So what can you do?

There are tons of sites out there that try to give you free general templates to view to calibrate on the fly. They are okay, especially if you are only sharing photos on the web or you aren't worried so much about them having that professional polish. But if you really want to step it up, you gotta get some software.

There are some calibrators out there that are well, expensive. They do there job well, but sometimes it's tough to shell out $200 bucks or more for a calibrator when you still are investing in equipment. The most popular is probably Datacolor's Spyder Series. X-Rite and Colortron is also out there. Basically you attached this device to your screen and with software you adjust your monitor and it reads everything till you have a perfectly calibrated monitor. Great stuff.

Well, here is the cheap but fairly efficient way to calibrate your monitor.

If you have a Windows machine, you are in luck because there is a free piece of software called QuickGamma for calibrating your monitor. Make sure you download the english version.

QUICKGAMMA

If your on a mac there is an excellent program called SuperCal. To enable full features, which you really need, you have to pay $19 bucks. Honestly, I am all for open software and think some programs overprice their software to ridiculous amounts but this is cheap and really worth the 19 bucks.

SUPERCAL

Quickgamma adjust on the fly and sits down in your menu bar, where SuperCal actually makes new profiles you save and choose in your display preferences. This is the best I have found so far, any suggestions would be welcomed.