Calibrating your monitor for the best viewing experience

Proper monitor calibration will ensure that your colors and black levels are true, and will ensure that your monitor is producing the best results for editing and viewing images and videos. Plus, it’ll be easier on your eyes!

You could of course have us come out and perform a professional in-home calibration, but why not do it yourself and save the money? A quick at-home calibration is relatively speedy, hassle-free, and will greatly improve image quality.

Here’s Ctrl Alt Repair’s guide on calibrating your monitor to help make sure colors are represented accurately at all times. We can’t guarantee you will produce results as good as a professional calibration, but even these basic calibration procedures will help outshine your monitor’s factory presets.

Before you begin

You’re going to want to do several things before you begin the calibration process.

• Turn on your monitor at least a half hour before calibration so the monitor can warm up to its normal operating temperature and conditions.

• Set your monitor’s resolution to its native, default screen resolution.

• Make sure your calibrating in a room with moderate ambient lighting. The room doesn’t need to be pitch black, but you don’t want the sharp glares and color casts resulting from direct light.

• Familiarize yourself with your monitor’s display controls. They may be located on the monitor itself, on the keyboard, or within the operating system control panel

CALIBRATE USING BUILT-IN WINDOWS AND MAC TOOLS

Both MacOS and Windows have built-in calibration tools to help guide you, step-by-step, if you are new to the calibration process. The free tools should be the first stop if you’re merely a casual image junkie or working on a tight budget. They are extremely handy, quick, and easy to locate within your operating system. Keep in mind that the adjustments will be limited by the display type and model, though.

The assorted terms — gamma, white point, etc. — may seem a bit daunting at first glance, but each utility provides a relatively simple explanation of what they all mean. Realistically though, you don’t need to know the ins-and-outs of the jargon in order to calibrate your monitor.

Windows

In Windows 10, the calibration tool can be found by opening the Settings app. Click the System selection in the main menu, then pick Display in the next menu. Once you have Display open, scroll to the bottom and click Advanced Display Settings. Once again, scroll down until you see Color Calibration, and then click on that.

Older versions of Windows can find the Color Calibration utility in the Display section of the Control Panel, which is listed under Appearance and Personalization. Alternatively, you can usually open the utility with a Windows Search. Just enter “color calibration” in the search bar, and it should appear as the first result.

Window’s thorough instructions will walk you through the calibration process once you’ve found and opened the software utility. Just follow the on-screen instructions to choose your display’s gamma, brightness, contrast, and color balance settings. A sample image for you to match will accompany many of the settings. Simply make adjustments to mimic the sample as close as possible. Once the calibration wizard is complete, make sure to choose the “current calibration,” or return to the previous calibration if you are unsatisfied with the results.

MacOS

In MacOS, the Display Calibrator Assistant is located in the system preferences under the Displays tab. If you are having trouble finding it, try entering “calibrate” in Spotlight to scan through your computer’s various folders and files. The result should show an option to open the utility in the System Preferences panel.

Your Mac’s step-by-step instructions will walk you through the calibration process once you’ve found and opened the software utility. Just follow the on-screen instructions to choose your display’s brightness, contrast, native gamma, target gamma, and target white point. Click Continue and save the calibration profile once you’ve finished with the adjustments.

CALIBRATE USING ONLINE UTILITIES

There are a handful of web-based calibration tools that help you manually adjust your monitor settings, ones that essentially ditch the automation in favor of a bit more customization and control.

• Display Calibration — Display Calibration will let you view several test patterns and samples of what a properly calibrated screen will look like. Although the site isn’t the most aesthetically pleasing and it’s rarely updated, the on-screen calibration tools for brightness, contrast, color depth, and screen resolution can prove useful if you can’t access any built-in calibration tools.

• Photo Friday — Photo Friday is a simple webpage that’s designed to help you calibrate the brightness and contrast of your screen. Just adjust the monitor settings until the transition of tones from black to white are clearly distinguishable on the screen.

• Online Monitor Test — Online Monitor Test is one of the better calibration websites out there. It’s lined with a slew of interactive tests to help you adjust your monitor’s screen colors and to see if your monitor can produce smooth gradients. There are also tools for pinpointing damaged pixels and back-light bleeding, rendering the website one of the more robust web-based calibration tools to date.

• The Logam LCD Monitor Test Pages — The Logam LCD Monitor Test Pages are handy, both online and offline. The website not only allows you to adjust various things such contrast and response time, but it also allows you to download the images as a 120KB zip file, so you can check any monitor in-store that your are thinking about purchasing.