GETTING TECHNICAL - CALIBRATING THE MONITOR

Monday, May 09, 2005

I am burning the midnight oil trying to calibrate the monitor. I was not sure how to go about it. I remembered someone telling a long ago that you need some special hardware to calibrate the monitor, but I was not sure. As usual I looked up at many sources and resources. A friend said Samsung ships a monitor calibration software with its monitor but my Samsung monitor did not come with any. I was thinking of skipping this operation but luminous landscapes strongly objects to skipping monitor calibration - they say it is a very important step. But they also recommend using hardware calibrators for which I don’t have money to spend.

Next, I checked Norman Koren's website. Trust him to come with elaborate technical details of things to do. He gets a little geeky but it is worth understanding all that. He gives the basics of calibrating the monitor here. I followed his procedure to setup my monitor and was surprised with the results. The images looked much better after setting up the monitor. Here is a quick summary of what I did:

1. Set the color temperature to 6500K(daylight)
2. Set the contrast to highest
3. Adjust the brightness to suggested level.
4. Adjust the gamma using one of the softwares mentioned in his website. Koren recommends Quick Gamma. If you have Photoshop, if comes with Adobe Gamma tool which you can find in the control panel.

After calibration, I checked some pictures. I could see much more details in the areas that I presumed are completely dark. The saturation of colors was much better. The exercise took me around two hours. It was worth every second of it.