Calibration

No easy answer

- put the monitor in a as good as possible position. Remove reflections, flare, or bad angels. Maybe build a something around the monitor to reduce light from the side. All of them can change either color or contrast.

-choose a whitebalance, e.g. 6500k , if supported by the monitor.

- Take any pixel picture tool (paint or something like this) and draw 10 fields from one side to the other. Then fill the fields with one color, And change the color intensity from 0% in 10% steps to 100% in  last field. E.g start with red, and use the red value 0 in the next 26, in the following 51, until you reach 255 (usual color values go from 0 to 255 )

repeat it for red, green, blue, white.

If they all look harmonic, try the Eizo tool. aIt does the same, but much more detailed (not a good starting point)

https://www.eizo.de/zubehoer/software/monitor-test/

Then print the color-pages, and compare paper to monitor. Usually are printerdrivers already precalibrated. And only some support adjustments. 

FLens

In my view most screens are too cool (bluish) and too bright, making the prints too warm and too dark (because we adjust to try to make it look right on the screen). Work in a dim environment with no direct sunlight, lower the brightness until it looks a little dim. Adjust if the pictures come back too dark. If you send out to print   places like Bay Photo have a human do color and brightness correction so that can help until you get a calibration tool, which are surprisingly affordable. 

The investment you would have to make isn't that big, and you'll make it up by not wasting paper and time.

I did a write-up on this subject for my students.  Hopefully you'll find it helpful.

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Getting satisfying prints can be challenging when what comes out of the printer doesn’t match what you see on the screen.

The reason for this is usually that either the brightness or monitor color doesn’t match the brightness or color of your paper when you hold the paper next to your monitor.

Andrew Rodney has a great video on this subject: Why are my prints too dark?

There is a path to solving this problem that you can follow to a point where you are comfortable.

You can start by adjusting your monitor brightness so it matches the brightness of the paper you are using.  Then use a combination of the print adjustment options in Lightroom (bottom of Print Job panel) and create soft-proof virtual copies where you tweak settings to find the combination that yields a good print.

This approach will involve a lot of hit-and-miss and burn through your paper supply.  And because monitor brightness and color drift over time, the settings that work the first time you print an image may not work the next time.

Moving forward a step, you would buy a monitor calibration tool (Calibrite and Datacolor make good ones):

Calibrite Colorchecker Display, $149

Datacolor Spyder X Pro Colorimeter, $170  

With the calibration tool, called a colorimeter, you will establish a brightness+color target that will create a standard setting, and then you will periodically recalibrate your monitor to that target.  At that point, you will have a stable monitor to work with.

The calibration process will first have you set your monitor brightness.  Next, it will have you set a white point color.

• Many photographers set their white point to match an industry standard: D50 which is the color of daylight in indirect light – like what you would get from a north-facing window.  To make this choice work, you will either need to have studio lighting that matches D50 (approx. 5000k) or you will need to make color adjustments in a proof copy to adjust for the color temperature difference.
  • JP Caponigro has a great technique to solve this problem.  You take the image into Photoshop and add an adjustment layer for the type of change you need to make.  Often this would be a Hue-Sat adjustment layer with a blue-yellow adjustment layer dialed in (for example, more yellow if your room light is incandescent).  Then you add a mask with a gray gradient.  Pick the spot where the color looks right and sample the mask there to get the percent of gray.  Replace the mask with that percentage of gray and you are ready to print.
• A second approach that involves less guesswork is to adjust your white point target to match your paper white.  This can be challenging to accomplish in some of the calibration software and might mean you have to do multiple calibration runs to get it right, but once you have it locked in you should be able to get a print that closely matches your screen every time.
  • The one problem with this approach is that you have to create a profile for each paper you use.  Since each target creation is a one-time process, this is a small price to pay for print consistency.

The last step is to work on your studio lighting.  

• You want lights with a high color rendering index (CRI), preferably 98 or higher.  
  • Feit makes LED lights with high CRI (available through Home Depot)  
  • Tailored Lighting makes very high CRI lights in both incandescent and LED.  They make clip-on lights that work with the Solux incandescent bulbs that are affordable and will enable you to create a good print-viewing setup.
• Also, consider what color temperature of light you want to use.  5000k lighting is pretty cold and isn’t what most people have in their houses and thus is not the way your prints are likely to be seen.  An alternative that splits the difference between daylight (5000k) and tungsten (2400-2700k) is 3500k.  Solux bulbs come in 3500k and that is what I use.  But along with that I also set my calibration target to match the color under that light.

I'm strongly in favor of calibration, but it is primarily for color and not brightness.  It will help you to set the brightness of your monitor so it more closely matches your print, but there are fundamental differences.  Your monitor is likely to look brighter than a print because it generates light.  Prints rely on reflected light so how it is being viewed makes a big difference.  PPA's print competition has prescribed lighting that is quite bright by most standards, and that is quite different from a print in room with normal ambient lighting.  Peter Lik's galleries lights each print individually.  My home gallery has lighting designed for the space and the displays I intend to hang.

Start with calibration.  If your prints are too dark, in your editor of choice change your background to White.  Also make sure to use your histogram to make sure something in your image normally approaches the right edge of the histogram.  Finally, make sure you are only applying a single profile - usually from your editing software.  

After that, expect to see some trial and error to adjust your image to the print desired.  I always create proof prints before making a large print.  My proof prints are on 8.5 x 11 paper - Epson Premium Luster most of the time.

This is what I do for my Surface 7 Pro tablet, too lazy to dig out the colorimeter...  😆 

The tablet's screen is close to sRGB, so I just use a sRGB profile as my display profile.  If you're using a monitor, check to see if it has a sRGB or better, AdobeRGB mode.  Turn that on, then use a corresponding profile for the display profile.  I wouldn't advise doing such for serious work where you're concerned with color consistency, but it works okay for casual use. 

If you are doing serious, just get a colorimeter.  Display characteristics change over time, and your calibration should be redone for any ambient lighting changes, so it's not like you'll use it once and forget it.  And if you're really serious, get a spectrophotometer like the Calibrite Studio instead.  It'll do display calibration, but you can also use such to measure target patches and even scene colors to make camera profiles. A must for reproduction work.  The Calibrite Studio used to be the X-Rite i1Studio for about $100 less, wish I'd have bought one then...

There a are a few very good articles on some website called PhotographyLife on the topic of calibration. I believe there is some guy called Nasim who wrote those... 😀  Highly recommend a read! 

Posted by: @pwarrenphoto

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How do I calibrate my computer so that what I am getting on the screen and what gets printed out match.  I know there are devices you can buy, but trying to save some money at this time.

Get a used XRite i1 Display Pro off Ebay. Seriously. It's a complete waste of time to eyeball it. 

Here's the best part, even AFTER monitor calibration, your prints STILL won't match 1:1! 

You'll always be making test prints and compensating for the medium in which you're printing on. No way to avoid that, but having a solid monitor calibration and soft-proofing in Photoshop goes a long way to mitigating that. 

For years I calibrated my MacBook Pro displays with SpyderX Pro and was quite happy with the results.  Last year I upgraded to a new MacBook Pro with an Apple Silicon M1 Max chip and the new Liquid Retina XDR display.  The first time I attempted to calibrate the display, SpyderX Pro gave me some error message.  I contacted DataColor and they said the new Apple displays could not be calibrated.

Fortunately, the display is gorgeous and the color, contrast, etc. seem perfect.  I've seen no degradation in display parameters.

Do any of you know if any software is now available to calibrate the new Apple displays?

What I wonder: a new iPhone app has just been released from CaptureOne. How can you judge colors, let alone edit them, on an iPhone screen? That's an uncalibrated screen?

A $100 color calibrator is well worth it if you'll be printing.

If you won't, it's not necessary.

There's no replacement for a spectrometer measuring the output of your monitor and creating a profile that calibrates out as many of the inconsistencies with a real color space as it's possible to do.

Calibration gets you close to the real thing, but test prints are still necessary.

Thanks, kwong