On the internet Blogs, Podcasts and You Tube are full of advice that you have run to buy and expensive bit of gear and calibrate your monitor immediately. Well you don’t but its a bit complex after that.
If you want to go the full colour calibration route you actually need to start at the camera, cameraphone or scanner, then you can calibrate your monitor, and perhaps phone and data projector, then you must calibrate your printer. Only then can you reliably start using specific colour profiles. If you want to use outside print services or book publishers you will have to trust their calibration and colour profiles. There is a lot involved in that workflow chain and a lot of it is device specific.Then you will find that your photos look flat, unless you start with really good light. This might sound depressing but…
Ok I’ll start with your computer monitor which is where most folk feel they need colour help. If you’ve got a recent LCD or OLED screen you probably don’t need to worry. Most are carefully colour calibrated during manufacture and/or have some colour calibration features in their setup menu. They generally will be well set when you first unbox the screen. Over time the screen suffers a bit of degradation (normally in luminance of the all pixels) if they are heavily used. The older issues of fading and images burning in (if a single image is continually displayed) were a problem for the old CRT Monitor and TV screens). Some early Plasma TV screens had been reported as noticeably degraded in colour intensity over time. Recent discussion seem to claim plasma screens degrade slower than LCDs. I don’t have a plasma screen so I just have to accept that as true.
Really the only thing you need to check is the tonal balance of your monitor which you do with the brightness and contrast adjustments only. There are many calibration web apps but I have found the one on Photo Friday is very simple to use and always gives great results. Rather that use the screen capture here I suggest you go to the Photo Friday site and the Monitor calibration is down the bottom. The basic idea is you need to be able to see a true black and a true white on your screen (not grey approximations of them). Just go to the site and follow the on screen instructions. Believe me it works nicely. Once you’ve done this tonal calibration I’m sure you will notice improved colour rendering.
Yes the first step in good colour calibration is to work in Black & White.
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