Black looks gray, red is “too red,” orange drifts toward pink, and everything is either too bright… or too dark. These are small dilemmas that users must face sooner or later if they decide to pursue a faithful color reproduction on their monitors. The factors to consider are vast, and advanced calibration solutions are too expensive for the average wallet, but the web and operating systems have valuable resources that will put you on the right path when calibrating your screen.
For years, monitors as a whole have represented one of the greatest examples of the Plug & Play philosophy. Unless there’s an interface problem (for example, an HDMI display and a VGA graphics card), the operating system should detect and configure the new monitor appropriately. It’s increasingly common to have two (or more) screens connected to your computer, working in parallel with laptops and their own displays. At this point, differences in color, temperature, brightness, and contrast are inevitable.
Why calibrate your screen?
You have the ability to adjust all these values, but only if you recognize a fundamental problem: Any “manual” calibration of a display ends up being subjective. What seems “perfect” to one user may look horrible to another. Add to that differences in monitor brands and their panels, overall age, backlight condition, drivers, graphics cards, and a very long etcetera.
Professionals cannot afford to enter such a labyrinth under any circumstances, and they prefer to purchase hardware-based calibration systems (with a base investment of $120) that solve the equation in twenty minutes or less. The rest of us mortals must follow a slightly more artisanal route.
Calibrating in Windows
Regardless of the tool you choose, calibrating your screen requires four basic conditions:
- Give the monitor half an hour to warm up (so its operation has stabilized).
- There must be no direct light on the screen (the darker the environment, the better).
- The resolution must be native.
- The settings (for both the display and the graphics card) must return to factory values.
If for any reason you don’t want to or can’t download software, don’t worry: Windows offers its own tools in the Control Panel. Gamma, brightness, contrast, and color balance are the main parameters that can be adjusted there.
Online Monitor Test
The people at FlatPanelsDK have put together a website with several versions of their Online Monitor Test system for calibrating screens. This lets you use it not only on computers but also on smartphones and tablets that allow fine adjustments to their displays. Color solidity, transitions, generic patterns, and pixel detection (in case any are faulty) are part of the repertoire. The page itself doesn’t give any recommendations; instead, it comes across as something similar to a reference catalog.
Lagom LCD Monitor Test
The portal known as Lagom LCD Monitor Test raises the level of complexity significantly, offering multiple images aimed at adjusting various aspects of the monitor, including darker parameters such as clock and phase, sharpness, and the always-questioned black levels, a chronic headache on many flat panels. Another interesting point is that the calibration images are available free of charge for download, and there are also versions without the sRGB profile that will help you determine color management in the operating system.
QuickGamma
The QuickGamma program gives the impression of being too old, but it works very well on any computer with Windows 7 or later (the official site has older builds for XP and Vista). As its name reveals, QuickGamma’s job is to give the user quick and precise control over the color gamut. Once you configure the ideal value (generally 2.2 is recommended under Windows), QuickGamma creates an ICC profile that loads automatically on every restart. If you think everything is too bright or too dull and monitor adjustments don’t help, maybe QuickGamma can do it.
Calibrize
Finally, we arrive at the gates of Calibrize, another dedicated application that stands out as a more user-friendly version of Windows’ calibration system. Brightness and contrast adjustments, along with gamma on the RGB channels, are divided into three simple steps, and like QuickGamma, Calibrize saves the final result in an ICC profile. Using profiles prevents us from combining results, since each program will try to set its own values as ideal for the whole system, but if QuickGamma seems too simple for you, here you have a good alternative.
That’s all for today. Screen calibration tools are very easy to use; however, the hard part is the rest of the process. “What looks good to you?” is a very difficult question to answer, and you’ll have to solve the mystery one parameter at a time, adjusting and studying the results. Good luck!
