Have you ever experienced a situation where your design or image looks great on your screen, but then when you share it with a client or send off to print the colors don’t match? If this sounds familiar, then your professional life would benefit from having a calibrated monitor.
What Is Monitor Calibration?
Monitor calibration means using a measurement tool or app to create a “fingerprint” or color (ICC) profile of your computer’s display to achieve accurate colors. Monitor calibration improves consistency and precision in color sensitive work, compensating for your particular environment – including natural light, screen brightness, and accounting for your specific monitor chromaticities, allowing for accurate profiles at different color temperatures. Color professionals recommend calibrating most displays at least once per month.
Why Color Professionals Calibrate their Monitors
Even if you think your color “looks fine as far I can tell,” without a calibrated monitor you can’t be sure, and it can lead to finger pointing when the color is off. In addition, the backlight on a computer display ages over time. The color you are viewing this month may look a bit different next month. The more time that passes between calibrations, the more likely your color has shifted.
One other thing, many users don’t ever look over their monitors’ settings such as brightness. You could be set to 100% brightness, dramatically shortening the life of your monitor. The calibration process has you evaluate your monitor’s brightness in your working environment. In most instances, a brightness level well below 100% will be more suitable.
You probably spent a pretty penny on a quality display. To ensure you get the most out of your investment, be sure to calibrate on a monthly basis.
Existing calibration products that use a colorimeter tend to be clunky and expensive. And free solutions that don’t involve measurement rely on guesstimation and do not work so well. That’s why we invented TruHu. At TruHu our mission is to make color calibration easy, inexpensive, and fast.
For more information on color calibration and everything related to color, check back in regularly with our blog. And for all your monitor calibration needs, the TruHu app is always a few clicks away.
