Monitor Calibration, Do I need it?

What is meant when someone mentions calibrating a monitor? Your operating system cannot be expected to get colours accurate considering there is an almost infinite combination of hardware available nowadays. Calibration is a process where you use a colour measuring device to measure the colours displayed on your screen. Together with the software, it compares them to established standards and corrects the displayed colours by way of an icc file.

Does this mean everyone needs to calibrate their monitors? That depends, where are your photos going and who is consuming them? If your photos end up floating around Instagram or Facebook, the need for calibration may not be important to you as your photos are being viewed on many different systems and monitors and it’s safe to assume that the majority of them are not calibrated either so you have no control over what your photos look like on those machines.

If you are a person who likes to print your images to hang on your wall, sell, give as gifts or what have you, you likely would benefit from calibrating. When you send your photos to a print house, colour becomes more important. Professional print houses typically take great care to assure their equipment is representing colour accurately so if your files are off due to inaccurate colour handling, it could cause trouble that you won’t like later. Besides colour rendition, most calibration devices also help you to set brightness and contrast of your monitor. This is pretty important also as most monitors are set way too bright, they want to draw attention in the showroom, right? A monitor that is set too bright will produce dark images when printed. If you are experiencing prints that are too dark or too light, I would bet that calibration is your culprit.