Monitor Calibration - not all monitors are the same.

Have you ever wondered why some of your images look great on one monitor and lousy on another?

Did you know that viewing images in different browsers like Firefox, Safari, Chrome and Internet Explorer, may cause the same image to look different colours on the same computer?

Do you know about monitor calibration, colour spaces and ICC profiles?  No?

This is the reason why prints of your photos or your reproductions may look different in real life to the images you see on your screen. I've tried to keep this really simple for the average person - if you are a pro photographer you should already be well aware of this information and have spent the appropriate dollars to calibrate your monitor properly.

There are many factors that can affect how you see your images but here's a couple of the main ones.

YOUR MONITOR - All monitors come 'calibrated' out of the box but that calibration is not always correct for you and the work you do. Every monitor used to view images for correct colour should be calibrated using special tools like the Xrite i1Display Pro or the Datacolor Spyder4Pro. Without tools like these you can only guess at calibration your monitor and that can only end badly. We calibrate our monitors at least every month to ensure that what we see on our screens is what we end up with in print but there's more to it than that.

There are three aspects to monitor calibration - Brightness, Gamma and White Balance (Colour Temperature). The amount of light in the room around you can also have an effect on what you see.

COLOUR SPACES - Don't you just love graphs? All those pretty colours? But what do they all mean? Usually when I start talking about colour spaces I can see the eyes glaze over and blah,blah,blah, blah, blah, blah blah. Hey! WAKE UP THIS IS IMPORTANT!

Actually all you really need to know, unless you want to make a study of colour, is that we work in (and prefer) AdobeRGB but the files you view on the web are typically in sRGB. Why? As the graph suggests, you get a better range of colours in AdobeRGB than in sRGB. Most digital cameras capture images in sRGB but if yours gives you the choice, take AdobeRGB.

ICC PROFILES - I'll keep this one short and sweet. In digital terms, all the colours you see are made up of a set of three colour values - Red, Green and Blue, ranging from 0 (black) to 255 (White). For example, here are some typical numbers...

You can see that Black is 0,0,0, and White is 255 and every colour in between is a combination of red (0-255), green (0-255) and blue (0-255) - that's a lot of possible colours.

While these are the exact numbers for these colours, each paper we print on reacts differently to the way the ink goes down so we need to write an adjustment (an ICC Profile) for each paper that we apply before we print your image.

I thought about spending ages writing a really long article to help you calibrate your monitor but figured there would be someone out there who had already done it for me and I was right - check out these guys at

http://www.imaging-resource.com/ARTS/MONCAL/CALIBRATE.HTM to read more about calibrating a monitor.

You need to remember also that your monitor and a print will never look exactly the same because one has light shining out of it, the other reflects light but with the right calibration, and great printing like you get here, they will be pretty darn close!

As always, if you have any questions, leave a comment - somebody else is probably thinking the same thing!