Viewing images - Monitor Calibration

Different ways of improving what your monitor shows

When making prints, we go to considerable lengths to produce just the image the photographer was looking for.

It is not easy to reproduce this on the Internet.

Why images don't look right

The images are smaller and less detailed, but the biggest variable is how you, the viewer, have your computer set up.

Many people never adjust their monitor's brightness and or contrast and we know that any talk about monitor calibration or monitor profiling, still leaves many graphics professionals confused.

In an attempt to help, we have some free test images here that we hope you can use to enhance your viewing experience...

We also have an article explaining why your prints don't match your screen, and what you can do about it.

Simple adjustments to your monitor

Have a look at the test images below, they are designed to help you adjust your screen to display images more accurately*.

You may find that your monitor looks somewhat odd after adjustment, especially if you needed to change it a lot.

This effect is quite normal and you will soon get used to it.

The controls on your monitor may be physical adjustment knobs, or a menu may appear on the screen (this is produced by the monitor itself, so the mouse won't work with that particular menu).

Calibrating your monitor for viewing photographs correctly

The strip shows a range of greys from pure black to pure white.

You should be able to see a clear difference between each shade of grey, ranging from pure black (left) and pure white (right).

Along the top of the strips are alternate patches of black and dark grey.

If it looks solid black to you (look very carefully), your monitor's brightness is too low.

Increase it until you can -just- perceive the difference between the grey and the black squares.

If it resembles either of the two strips below, it is set too bright or too dark...

too bright - loses highlight detail

too dark - loses shadow detail

Note that this test is actually just making sure you can see shadow and highlight details and is no way to set maximum brightness accurately - Ideally you need a hardware calibrator for this.

Other viewing tips

Newer LCD monitors are much brighter. If you have them too bright, then photos may look just fine but you find your prints look too dark. Ours are set to roughly 40% of maximum.
This happens so often I've written an article 'Why are my prints too dark'
With CRT monitors, you may need to alter the contrast setting to alter overall brightness. With LCDs the basic brightness setting is the one you want.
Reduce the room lighting and try to avoid reflections in the monitor. This is most important when editing photos to print. If your room is too bright then you will probably have the monitor too bright, which leads to the dark print problem above.
Set the monitor to display "millions of colours" or 24/32 bit and preferably been switched on for at least twenty minutes.
If your web browser allows you to use colour management, set this option on (if this means nothing to you, please ignore it, or look at some info on our Web Colour Management page).
A detailed explanation of what the brightness and contrast controls do.

Monitor Calibration

Monitor calibration -can- be a quite complex (and relatively expensive) process, if you want to do it -very- accurately - with special measuring devices and careful attention to room lighting and decoration.

Keith uses various hardware and software for calibrating and profiling his laptop and desktop machines (Monitor calibration equipment reviews and articles)

There are a range of cheaper effective display calibration devices that have come on to the market in the last few years - we have reviewed most of them on this site and are always happy to answer questions (Note - we don't sell them though)

Fortunately it's easy to get a noticeable improvement for free, as outlined above.

That process is really there for viewing the Black and White images in the gallery, and as such, leaves colour balancing out. If you have a Macintosh, try typing 'monitor calibration' into the Help Center, this will point you to the built in calibration features (More on Mac OS X calibration).

If you want a more accurate version, have a look at SuperCal which is a shareware application for Macs.

On a Windows PC the facilities are found in the display control panel, or by right clicking the desktop and choosing 'properties'. You will probably need some third party software to generate a profile for your monitor since it is not included in Windows. You also want to make sure that 'Adobe Gamma' software is not messing things up, see: 'Removing Adobe Gamma'

An example is the free "Monitor Calibration Wizard" from Hex2Bit

Do remember that for accurate colour work you should consider getting a hardware calibrator

More information on Calibration and Colour Management

Keith's very simple guide to 'what is colour mangement'.
Is the red in RGB the same as a London bus, or a UK Telephone box? A very short explanation of what colour management is, and why you use it.
Test images - our collection of test images for checking monitors and printers
Some further links to 'adjusting your monitor by eye' techniques can be found at:
http://desktoppub.about.com/cs/visualmonitor/index.htm
An introduction the art/science of colour management at
http://creative.gettyimages.com/source/services/color_resources.asp
Win XP SP2 Dual monitor profiling
A short note about some software that may help improve your colour management on Win XP systems. Includes link to free Microsoft software that improves colour management functionality for all XP SP2 systems. Definitely worthwhile if you use a PC :-)

Keith has written several articles on colour management, including an Introduction to Colour Management. There are more related items on our Photography and digital imaging info page or the Apple Mac technical page.

Equipment reviews

The reviews section of this site has detailed information about the PrintFIX PRO and newer Spyder3Print and ColorMunki printer profiling systems, the Spyder2 PRO and Spyder3 monitor calibrator, various Eye One calibration systems, the Huey monitor calibrator from Pantone and Spyder2express monitor calibration system from ColorVision.

At a more advanced level there is ColorEyes Display Pro, monitor profiling software that works with a variety of measurement devices. Tested with Spyder2, Eye One Display 2 and Eye One Pro.

There is also a page devoted to web photo gallery colour management. It shows some simple ways of making sure that people see your web images at their best.

Can Northlight help?

Northlight Images provides commercial photography services including colour management advice and training for organisations (PC or Mac based). This is in addition to our specialist Apple Macintosh related consultancy and support services in the UK East Midlands.

Northlight Images prides itself on its independence when giving advice. We do not sell hardware or software and have no direct commercial links with any of the software or hardware vendors that may be mentioned here. See our Review Policy for more information.

Other areas of our site that may be of interest...

As well as our Commercial Photography services and Training there is a growing collection of photography Articles and Reviews on the site aimed at helping you get the best out of your own photography. We also have a growing collection of Photography related information and links that we hope you find useful.

New site features and some of Keith Cooper's latest work are always covered in the What's New page.

Visiting Leicester or wondering where it is? We have views from the Leicester traffic cameras.