Monitor calibration is sometimes talked about more as a fear that the monitor will show wrong colors. It’s simple, we’ll show you how.
Monitor colors are a complex topic with many terms and parameters, let’s first clarify them. The resulting pixel color is defined using the red, green, and blue components. The monitor simply receives this information and displays a color on the pixel that it thinks corresponds to the parameters. It can be displayed exactly according to the original, but also completely wrong.
Monitors tend to have a lot of different modes, some like sRGB mode focus on accurate colors, others (blue light filter) can intentionally make them less accurate. The monitor itself does not recognize that it does not show the colors correctly. The human eye can recognize a color deviation up to a value of ΔE 3, but rather in the sense that when it displays a uniform color surface on the monitor, it will see it as varied above this limit. When a photographer sees a scene on the monitor that he has already photographed months ago, he has a hard time remembering the exact colors and realizes that his monitor is set incorrectly.
Next to the deviation ΔE, the key term is the color space. Most Internet content is in the sRGB color space, but there is also a wider gamut – AdobeRGB. Rather outside photography, DCI-P3 or the even wider REC.2020 color spaces are used. Wide gamut means it can display more colors from the visible spectrum.
If you use the AdobeRGB gamut, for example, it will cover more colors from the visible spectrum, but in most cases the colors will be inaccurate. When watching an ordinary video on the Internet or viewing a photo, you will have a source in sRGB, and the monitor will expand them to AdobeRGB, so they will be more saturated than the original. In order for a wider gamut to make sense, it is necessary to have a whole chain in this color space – for a photographer, it is a camera, a monitor and a printer. However, when published on the Internet, there is a risk that people will view the photo on monitors with different gamuts.
For example, the number of bits per channel does not play a critical role in calibration, since more bits allow finer discrimination between colors in the same gamut. Outside of the color space, however, the gamma value and white balance also matter, but these values are standardized to 2.2 and D35, so there is no need to think about it during calibration.
What is needed for calibration
It can be calibrated “eyeometrically” using a high-quality photo and comparing it with the colors on the monitor and then changing the color profile in the OSD menu. However, this is not an exact method. For any calibration, you must establish normal conditions – ambient lighting, monitor brightness, and any user settings. In short, if you calibrate at high brightness and edit photos in the evening at reduced brightness, you cannot expect perfect results. Also turn off features like blue light filter or shadow boost.
The most common and most accurate is calibration using an optical probe, for which you also need calibration software and ideally a monitor that supports hardware calibration. The simplest solution is to buy a graphic monitor with a built-in or bundled probe, software is usually included, and the user is sure that everything will work together easily. That is also why we are using a ViewSonic monitor for this tutorial, their latest models have an optical probe included, cost less than 20,000 CZK and are usually of very high quality. However, the additional purchase of a separate calibration probe is not an obstacle, as it also comes with the necessary software.
The included ColorPro Wheel probe from ViewSonic is specific in that it also serves as a controller for setting up the monitor and must be connected using the Micro-USB-B connector and the classic USB-A connector directly to the monitor, and the monitor needs to be connected to the computer via a USB cable. Colorbration+ software must be downloaded from the official website.
How to calibrate
The probe calibration process is no rocket science. The Colorbration+ software allows you to choose between basic and advanced modes, 1 while the latter offers better options for checking the results and at the same time is less complicated for the user, so we will choose it. We will then check the choice of monitor 2 (if multiple monitors are connected) and the correct probe. 3
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