Colour Calibrating Your Computer: Achieving Perfect Digital Photo PrintsWriten by Dylan Tovey
Have you ever been disappointed with the quality of the prints you received from your local photo laboratory? Or wondered why you can spend hours tweaking your digital images and still get them back with strange colour tones or too much light? Welcome to the often frustrating world of colour calibration!
Problems with colour calibration occur because every computer screen has a different way of showing a particular colour. Even primary colours can be shown very differently if you view them on a different monitor or computer. To see this in action, try looking at the same image on both your own computer and that of a friend or colleague.
The frustrating thing is that the problem gets worse over time - as your computer screen ages it becomes less precise in the way it displays colours. What this means is that while an image may look great on your screen, it will look different and be printed differently at the printers. Some printing labs will try to adjust your photos for you - unfortunately this can often make them look even worse.
Calibrating your computer and a printing facility can be difficult - but in this article we outline some simple ways to achieve greater consistency.
Basic calibration:
There are a number of free online options you can use to achieve better calibration of your monitor.
Easy RGB has a simple step-by-step guide that will assist you to adjust a number of settings.
Software calibration:
The Adobe Photoshop image editing suite automatically installs a program called Adobe Gamma into your control panel (START-SETTINGS-CONTROL PANEL). Using this type of colour-calibration wizard will allow you to achieve far more accurate colour calibration settings.
For a free alternative to Adobe Gamma you should take a look at this program.
Hardware calibration:
The best possible calibration results are achieved by using physical calibration devices. By placing the device against your monitor, it can adjust your colour profile to a recognized standard. Although expensive, the Spyder 2 (http://www.colorvision.com/) is used by many professional design and printing companies.
Colour Profiles
To achieve as perfect as possible a match between the image you see on your screen and the one you get back from a printing lab you should ask for a copy of the colour profiles used to calibrate their printing machines. This is a small file that will tell your computer exactly how to display each colour for the greatest accuracy. Large photographic laboratories may be unwilling to provide you with this information, but many smaller agencies will be very amenable.
A final word
Taking photographs is an important part of capturing and preserving the important milestones and events of our lives. Many people will often spent hours in front of a computer editing their images before sending them off to be printed. Making sure your computer monitor is properly calibrated is one way you can make sure that your passion and effort is rewarded with stunning photographs.
Dylan Tovey works at the Australian canvas printing company http://www.brilliantprints.com.au/ He gets to see the good, the bad, and the ugly when framing and printing customer photographs. His own keen love of photography has turned him into an evangelical spokesperson for good photographic habits.