Getting the Most Out of Your Monitor

The first thing to ask yourself is whether you are prepared to spend some money calibrating your monitor, or if you want to try something that is free and may work very well. For the free approach, read on. To spend money, see “Other Calibration Methods” on page 45.

In order to determine how close your monitor is to telling the truth, you need to have some printed images as well as the actual image files that were used to produce the film and/or plates from which they were printed. However, before using the method described overleaf, or any other calibration method, first run through the following monitor checklist.

1. CRT monitors are pretty rare now. They can be calibrated using either the “backward calibration” method, or by one of the software/hardware solutions, both described over the page. So, are you using a good-quality flat-screen monitor? If you are using a low-quality or slightly faulty monitor, this chapter will not be of much help to you.

2. Make sure your monitor is displaying “Thousands of colors” (i.e. 16-bit) or more.

3. Do you have a background image on your desktop that is visible while you use Photoshop? If so, it will affect your judgement of color. Best, though boring, would be to replace it with a neutral gray, created using equal R, G, and B values of 128. On a scale of 256 shades, 128 represents the halfway point between on and off. If it is applied to all three colors the result is a 50% gray, an ideal background against which you can judge color and tone.

4. If your monitor has digital controls that allow you to choose the white point, try starting with it set to 6500K.

5. Macs have a transparent workspace that allows you to see the desktop image while working in applications such as Photoshop. This appearance will continually dilute your perception of the colors in the image you are working on. Any neutral, mid-tone gray will be better. This can be put in place by opening the system preferences and choosing Desktop & Screen Saver. Click on Desktop and then choose Solid Colors from the list. There are two gray options available, both of which work well. PCs do not have this problem, as Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign all use a neutral gray background as a default.

6. Many users will consider all of the above to be important while completely ignoring one of the most important points of all: The lighting in your working environment. You have to control this if you can, otherwise any other calibration you do will be compromised. Lights can be turned on or off; the sun goes up and comes back down again; some days are overcast, some are bright. All these variables affect how everything in your field of vision appears to you, including the images displayed on your monitor. If you are serious about getting things right in print, you will aim to have as few variables as possible getting in the way. Figure out the kind of lighting that will work best for you, and try to stick with it. And never, ever, work with light reflecting off the screen. It is not only bad for color judgement, it is bad for your eyes.

7. Monitors get old, so you should check and recalibrate if necessary every two or three months. If you find that you can no longer set it the way you used to, and need to, then unfortunately it is time for a new monitor.

Hopefully you already have, or can get hold of, some images that have been placed into a Quark or InDesign file that has then been printed on an offset press. They do not have to be the full-size versions—it is fine to use lower-resolution copies. The best kind of image to work with is either a TIFF (tagged image file format) or PSD (Photoshop document) file; don’t use an EPS (encapsulated PostScript) file if you work in Quark, as they don’t look great on screen. The important thing is that the color has not been adjusted at all since the job was printed. You will also need a representative printed copy (from the “good” part of the run).