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Check Your Monitor |
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There are programs and equipment designed to check your monitor that range in price from few hundred to a few thousand dollars. For those of you who don't need that kind of color and brightness accuracy, you can do the quick and dirty checks below. |
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This is a grayscale. You should see 24 distinct shades of gray ranging from pure white on the left to pure black on the right. If you don't see 24 distinct tones, adjust your monitor's BRIGHTNESS and CONTRAST. |
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This is a color chart and grayscale. If your monitor color is reasonably accurate, the colors across the top should be RED, YELLOW, GREEN, CYAN, BLUE, and MAGENTA. If they aren't, the color on your monitor is significantly off. The second row has more muted versions of the same colors. The bottom row is a six step grayscale from black to white. There should be no color tint in the bottom row. You can probably set a range of color temperature settings on your monitor from 5500K to 6500K to 9300K. Most RGB monitors look best if they are set around 6500K. |
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From top to bottom you should see a smooth transition of hues with saturated colors at the top to pastels tones at the bottom ending in almost white. If the transition is not smooth or looks jagged, your monitor is not set for enough colors. In your software, go to the control panel and then to the monitor settings. Set the monitor for the highest color quality or number of colors (like 32 bit or 16 million colors). This is NOT the same as setting the number of pixels (like 800x600 or 1024x768). For a lot of information about color management and getting your prints to match your monitor, go to Norman Koren's site. If you need the optimum in calibration for your monitor and don't want to break the bank, then check out the Optical software and monitor "Spyder" from Colorvision.
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Copyright © Jim Doty, Jr. All rights reserved. |
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