People’s perception of color in particular is very different and for that reason alone, it is not worth touching these built-in or free tools you might find online to calibrate your monitor. While it might sound like a good idea to use such tools to calibrate your monitor, aside from perhaps setting the gamma setting, all other adjustments are potentially very dangerous and that’s for one simple reason – you cannot use your own eyes to adjust colors, brightness or contrast, because it is all very subjective. For example, Microsoft’s “Display Color Calibration” is part of all the recent Windows operating systems such as Windows 10, which allows you to adjust your monitor’s gamma, brightness and contrast, and even color balance: One of the free tools might come as part of your operating system and is usually available for both Windows and Mac platforms. When it comes to color calibration, you will find plenty of free and commercial tools that will allow you to calibrate your monitor via software-only visual comparisons, or by using a hardware colorimeter. Therefore, if you have one of those cheap monitors and do not want to be plagued with inaccurate colors and tones, I highly recommend replacing it with a better monitor. It is important to have a reliable monitor for color calibration, because cheap consumer-grade monitors might shift their colors and brightness levels from time to time, potentially making color calibration less accurate and effective overtime. Perhaps you have a solid monitor worth calibrating, or perhaps it is time to upgrade to something better. While we have already provided our recommendations on best monitors for photography, if you would like to identify the type of monitor you are using for viewing and editing photographs, take a look at this article and see what you have today. That’s because such monitors were never designed for color critical work in the first place – they are consumer-grade monitors designed for basic computing, gaming and other needs. If you purchased a monitor for under $300-400 dollars, it most likely comes with a “TN” or “Twisted Nematic” panel that cannot accurately display colors due to limited color gamut and dithering, and might not have a good viewing angle. Without a doubt, your choice of a monitor is very important for accurate color reproduction. Thankfully, good colorimeters make it very easy to calibrate any monitor – as you will see from this article and the accompanying video further down, it does not take a long time and does not require any technical knowledge. If you have never properly calibrated your monitor in the past, you will be shocked to see how different your and other people’s images will look after proper calibration, especially if you have a lower-end monitor. I am glad I did not wait too long, because starting from that point of my career, I was able to produce solid work that looked consistently good. Thankfully, once I had a proper setup, I was able to go back and re-process my images. However, over time, I realized that selecting a proper monitor and color calibrating it was critical, especially if I wanted my photography to be taken seriously. I did not see how I could justify spending a few hundred dollars on a colorimeter, when my monitor cost me that much money in the first place. At first, I thought that perhaps I could use some free color calibration tools that were already built into my operating system in order to get more accurate colors. One day I had a chance to view my images on a color-calibrated computer and after seeing how bad the images looked, I realized that it was time to change. My images often ended up with over-saturated colors and strange tones, and having no idea about things like ICC color profile, I would often end up stripping all the metadata from my images, including those color profiles. At the time, I produced very inconsistent work, because I was looking at wrong colors during post-processing. I personally did not pay much attention to color calibration for a long time and I suffered greatly as as result. For example, a smooth and beautiful sunset might appear as pale, and a black and white picture might appear too dark or too bright. If your monitor is not properly color calibrated, you are most likely not seeing everything in images you view. Wrong! It is needed for everything – from viewing your and other people’s work, to processing your own images in Adobe Photoshop, Lightroom or any other software. One of the big misunderstandings about color calibration, is that people think that it is only needed for printing. The Process of Monitor Calibration Using Hardware Calibration.
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