Calibrating and characterizing your monitor

The first requirement for color management is to calibrate your monitor and create an accurate ICC profile for it. Although this doesn’t address your entire workflow, at least it ensures that your monitor displays colors as precisely as it can. Calibration is the process of setting your monitor, or any device, to known color conditions. Characterization, or profiling, is the process of creating an ICC profile that describes the unique color characteristics of your device or standard. Always calibrate your monitor, or any device, before creating a profile for it; otherwise, the profile is only valid for the current state of the device.