Alpha Photography Blog

Every manufacturer installs its own colour balanced calibration settings onto their computers. These settings may, or may not be appropriate for photo editing. So, before you start editing photos, you might need to adjust your computer’s settings.

To ensure that any editing you do is as accurate as possible, you will need to calibrate both your monitor and your printer (where you’d like to print photos yourself).

Here I’ll go through how to calibrate your monitor, and in a later post I’ll cover your printer settings.

Firstly though - to get a more accurate result, this process works best if you let your screen ‘warm up’.

For a desktop computer, begin the steps after the screen has been on for about 20 minutes, and for a laptop or notebook, about 30 minutes.

This process is also greatly enhanced by having a purpose-created colour balanced test image open. If you go to a search engine (I used Google) and in the image search function type in “colour test image”, you should find a number of files with multiple small images on it, with colour variations.

Keep this image visible during all the steps below.Once you are ready:

• Go to Control Panel;
• Open “Adobe Gamma”;
• Step by Step (Wizard) should be selected, so click Next;
• Leave the description as is, and click Next again;
• If you have the ability to change your monitors brightness (laptops generally don’t have this functionality), change the settings until the inside box is slightly lighter than the outside box. Click Next;
• Leave the phosphors setting as is, and click Next;
• Untick “View Single Gamma Only”;
• Under each coloured box, slide the dial to the left or right, until the inside box looks like it almost blends with the outside box (I find squinting while doing this helps);
• Tick “View Single Gamma Only”;
• Slide the dial under the grey box until the inside box almost appears to blend with the outside box - you’ll see the darkness of the test image move to what your eye considers an optimal level;
• Click Next;
• Click Measure;
• Click OK;
• A black screen will now appear with 3 boxes - each a different shade of grey. Hopefully, the box in the middle looks the most ‘natural’ (that is, the box on the left has a blue hue, and the one on the right has a reddish hue). If the middle one looks like it doesn’t have a coloured hue, click on this box;
• Click Next;
• Click Next again;
• Looking at your test image, click on the Before circle, then the After circle, and check out the difference - hopefully After is better;
• If you’re happy with the calibration, click Finish;
• You can now choose to save the calibration. I generally save it with the date, so I can see the last time I went through this process;
• You have now calibrated your monitor!

It’s a bit of an involved process, but over time it becomes second nature.

If you always work in the same room, under the same lighting conditions, at the same time of day, then you won’t need to calibrate your monitor too often.

But, if you sometimes work in the living room, where it’s sunny and bright, and then next time you’ll work in a room with unnatural light, at night, your calibration settings will need to be tweaked before you start.

This will ensure you give yourself a real head start at getting those photos looking exactly the way you want them to!

In the next post I’ll go through some Photoshop fundamentals.

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