Topic awaiting preservation: Monitor Calibration?

I figued this would be the bast place to ask this questio. All you print people seem to have a thing about color.....

Anyone know of any good online monitor calibration guides on the web?

Adobe Gamma is probably the best tool you have already on your computer for monitor calibration...You can purchase expensive equipment and software to calibrate your monitor more precisely, but I doubt you're wanting to go there...
I have heard that if your monitor is more then 3 years old, that the phosphors start to die and accurate calibration becomes darn near impossible...Something to keep in mind....Oh and here's my link for ya. http://www.adobe.com/support/techguides/color/

Heh - *we* don't have a thing about color - the people we bill have a thing about color!

This is a very subjective thing. Soft proofing. The ideal is the "closed loop", where you view output with controlled lighting and adjust your monitor. That not often practical for those of us not in in-house situations where the outut is always the same.

Hardware calibrators attempt to remove some of the subjectivity your eye is prone to. I use one.

One thing to keep in mind is to have the right surronding light. It makes more difference than people think in general. A good light should be around 5000K, and have a CRI of at least 95.
This does make the biggest difference when looking at printed material, but it makes difference for a screen as well. A screen cap is also a good thing


I agree that Adobe Gamma is probably the best for you to use. And if you only do graphics for the web you are probably best off using the sRGB color profile in PhotoShop. (or does anyone disagree with that? I am not 100% sure myself...)

Actualy, I should have been a little more specific in my question. I posted in the Print forum as I thought I'd attact the best answers here and it seems I have. However, let me clarify thing a little.

I only do web work, so appart from some basic colour managament between my Digi Cam, Scanner and Monitor I'm a fairly happy camper. Although I did happen to notice that when using certain colour profiles in photoshop they quite often looked very different in my native OS's display.

Honestly, that really doesn't help me any. What's the point of designing colour accurate documents in an application that has a different colour profile to the app everyone else is going to view it in! Sure, I could disable the colour profiles alltogther but then what's the point of stardards if I'm not going to support them. What I want to do is calibrate my native Win 2000 monitor profiles so that it matches the sRGB standard(sRGB was designed for digital display pourposes was it not?). Then I was intending on adding this into an article I'm working on and eventualy put it on the web.

Colour profiles and standards like sRGB are all good and fine but if they only apply to the design apps and not the viewing apps than seriously, what's the point? Or is there a way to apply the sRGB colour profile in web browsers? However, even if there was a way to do this there should still be a giude to manualy calibrate your monitors hardware settings so the said monitors profile (say sRGB) looks similar accross all displays.

Or am I barking up the completly wrong tree here?

You're barking, but there's no tree.

Calibrating meticulously makes sense in a print environment. Not for the web. That's my humble opinion of course, but it's based on this: when you print a brochure, whether it's a hundred copies or 10,000, everyone who gets one is going to see the same thing (give or take a little variance in the press run). That is not at all the case on the web. I doubt that 0.1% of the internet audience has a calibrated monitor. It was the single biggest barrier to ecommerce for clothing retailers. People would order the blue sweater they saw on their screen, and return it when it turned out to really be gray.

sRGB maybe the default profile, but that doesn't mean jack sh*t in the real world. I think png images permit embedded profiles, and maybe some browsers make an attempt to reconcile that with the display, but the painful reality is that most people buy a computer, put the pieces together, turn it on and that's it. Most don't even have a clue that it's *possible* to adjust anything other than brightness, like a TV.

It's a worthy goal, but hopeless I think. How many times have we read posts here on the Asylum by people surprised to discover the outer boundaries of this place are blue? Get what I mean? I really really believe there is no way at all to anticipate what any given viewer is going to see on ther monitor, and that will pretty much be true forever. Pantone has made some attempts, but really - who's going to convince the vast majority of surfers that there is an advantage to diddling with their display? It just ain't gonna happen.

Just my rant. Feel free to shread it.

Have to agree with the above mentioned. Don´t bother if you only do stuff for the web. Try to, if possible, check the colors in different environments. I use mac at work, and have both mac and pc at home, so I try to check it out in both places. But this i only when designing for the web, when I do magazines, ads, and stuff for press I go by numbers, nothing else. Curves and numbers. Have gotten too many surprises during the years, he he. Zox told you about surrounding light which can be a big problem. Im using a "hat" or whatever it´s called in english. I have also used a hardware calibrator. Adobe Gamma will absolutely bee enough if you want to calibrate.

"What we see changes what we know. What we know changes what we see"
Read that in a book, cant remember which one, but it sounds right? hopefully I got it right!

Tommy

Tommy: we call it a "hood"



And I use one on the computer in the studio where it's not practical to control the ambient light.

We're mac based. When we work on files intended for the internet or powerpoint for PC clients (which most of ours are), we always set the color space to sRGB, and it makes a noticable difference in display. That's about all I feel I can do. If the numbers say neutrals are neutral, and if we're adjusting brightness in sRGB so they won't look too dark on a PC, I don't know what more we can do.