You can also use simple online monitor calibration tools, such as this one.
Here’s an article explaining how to calibrate monitor in Windows and here’s one showing the same thing for Mac. Most modern, high-end monitors come factory calibrated so you don’t need to do much but it costs nothing to check if your settings are good. Basically, you have to divorce your personal tastes in brightness and contrast, set monitor temperature to 6500 degrees Kelvin then tweak the display settings until they match the rules you read on screen. If your monitor uses arbitrary color settings like, “Movies,” “Text” or “Gaming,” it’s time to meet calibration.Ĭalibration is the process of getting your monitor to show the widest range of colors and gray tones, so you get to see things the way they were meant to be seen. You get to see colors nobody else has seen before and you get to be famous in the neighborhood. That’s exactly why you need to ignore everybody and get a big, pricey screen most people are afraid to look at. You can imagine how much they care about color and shelf life. They use cheap electronics and cheap display technologies with only one purpose in mind – getting a big, flashy price sticker in local electronics store. While most monitors can be used for gaming and business purposes, they’re not created with professionals like you in mind.
You cannot expect to have good color reproduced on a monitor which wasn’t designed for professional use or is simply too old to get colors and brightness values right. Working with an old or cheap monitorįirst things first. So let’s see what usually goes wrong with it. Working with color is an essential part of the graphic design industry and mistakes with color can be a big financial loss in the print industry. It might not sound fun but it’s a serious business. Our world is mostly RGB, CMYK or hexadecimal, with regular trips to HSB. As designers, we don’t have the luxury of talking about colors figuratively.