Clear the Mist - The need forMonitor Calibration

Mist is terrible for a driver. You struggle to make out where you are heading and you're never truly certain of what lies ahead. And the light from your headlamps bounces back to you and whites-out the view.

It'd be even worse if your living was reliant on steering your car straight along, unerringly following the center line and you still had to be able to drive somewhere near the speed limit.

Photoshopping your photos on a poorly calibrated monitor is a bit like that experience of driving in fog. You can make all the adjustments that you like but you'll never be certain of what the final result will be because you just have no benchmark against which to judge it.

If your monitor is too dark, you'll tend to lift the brightness of the photographs too much so that they end up over-exposed and you will lose the detail in the brighter parts of the image. Naturally, the opposite will apply if the monitor is set overly bright. When the images come back from the printers, or are examined on someone else's, correctly calibrated screen, the detail in the shadows will be gone and you will end up with big areas of boring black instead of depth and body.

Color inaccuracy is another area you really should remember. This can be a result of the light not being the same as your camera's white balance setting or the automatic white balance has perhaps been fooled by a broad area of a particular color within the image.

And yet it doesn't have to be so. It is simple to achieve accurate calibration on a modern monitor, utilising one of the many different monitor calibrators which are available, such as the Datacolor Spyder 3 Pro, Eye One Display 2 or ColorMunki Photo. These tools are simplicity itself to use, simply plug them in, control the light in the room and set the software running. They will monitor the background light level in the room, setting the contrast and brightness on your screen and also calibrate the color balance for precise results.

The more sophisticated calibrators will even sit on the worktop, constantly measuring the light levels and warning you or changing the screen as necessary.

Don't assume your eyes can do the work. You would be shocked at how tolerant your eye is to inaccurate color. Whilst you're working on your picture, your brain will adapt to and compensate for the monitor but when you get your print back, it will all look just
wrong. And you can't get back information that just doesn't exist in the print.

Get yourself a monitor calibrator and don't let fate take the lead any more. Steer the "car" where YOU decide for it to go!