Isn’t it frustrating when you take an amazing Photography Calibrate, but when you take a print out, it doesn’t resemble how it used to look on your computer screen? Does it bother you when the colors look off? Well, this is because of your uncalibrated printer and/or monitor.
If you are a professional photographer or a graphic designer or an artist, you know how essential it is for you to have the proper equipment for editing photos and even videos. Your laptop or computer screen has to be in sync with your printer for your pictures to match the way it actually looked to you. For this purpose, you need to color calibrate your monitor and printer. If you do not know how to do the same, the solution is here to help you through the process. Read ahead to know everything that you need to know about color calibration and how to do it for your monitor and printer.
What is color calibration?
First things first, let’s talk about what actually is color calibration and why it is essential. Color calibration is used to measure and adjust the colors displayed on your screen to match with the print you take out of the same. It helps in adjusting the saturation and brightness of your photograph to how it would have looked to you in real life. The reason why color calibration is necessary is that it makes your photos and videos look natural, saturated, and with the proper amount of light and contrast.
Who should calibrate their monitor and printer?
For a normal person, it doesn’t make any difference whether their screens are calibrated or not. However, if you are a professional photographer or an artist or a graphic designer, it is undoubtedly a requirement for you to color calibrate your devices. If you’re in this field not as a hobbyist and actually earn a living out of it, you should calibrate your monitor and your printer as well because many times the colors your monitor displays and those displayed on the print look quite different. This is because your monitor sees color in RGB (red, green, blue), whereas your printer sees color in CMYK (cyan, magenta, yellow, black).
How to calibrate your monitor?
Coming on to the main question, there are a few ways for how to calibrate. You can either buy calibration kits available in the market or you can calibrate by simply adjusting your screen settings, which are built-in tools available in both Windows and Mac. The third way is to use online calibration tools which are available easily. From these 3 ways, the best way is to buy the hardware kit for calibration, which might seem a bit expensive, but it works like a charm and makes your photos appear beautifully on the screen.
How to calibrate for Windows and for Mac?
Before going further and tell you the steps, please note that you’ll need a Windows 10 for calibrating your computer/laptop. So for calibrating in windows, all you have to do is click on the search box on the bottom left corner, type calibration, and a pop-up toolbox will appear. It will help you navigate your way through calibration, and all you’ll have to do is adjust the gamma and brightness to how you’d like them to be. If you don’t like this new ICC ( International Color Consortium) profile, you can click on cancel, and it’ll go back to previous settings.
For Mac, it is a similar process as well. What you have to do is go to System Preferences, click Displays and then click the Calibrate color button. Similar to windows, the toolbar that will appear will guide you in how to adjust the brightness and contrast levels.
How to calibrate your printer?
It would be best if you calibrated your monitor before you move on to calibrating your printer. Within the printer, there are built-in controls for overall tuning and adjustment of colors and how they’d appear on the print. You need to remember that your monitor calibration and printer calibration has to be in sync and so make sure that both of them have the same ICC profile. For printers also, other than the built-in controls, hardware devices can be used. If the built-in features don’t suffice you, then you should definitely purchase the hardware device.
So this was all that we have for you in-store on helping you color calibrate your monitor and printer. Hopefully, this must-have managed to answer all your questions and guided you to calibrate your equipment properly. On a side note, if you are a professional photographer and graphic artist, it is suggested that you invest in good quality equipment as they are much more advanced than the normal ones available in the market.