Technical Support     

Color Management Issues

Computer monitors are like television sets you can find in any department or retail store. Each has its own color and density settings depending on the model and manufacturer. You will rarely notice a difference in color unless you put two of the television sets side by side and compare the quality of the color and density. This is how computer monitors are, and rarely have I ever seen a monitor look like a printed image without any color calibration done to the monitor. I will go over this more in a minute.

There are several items to look at when adjusting a monitor's color balance to match a printed image. First off is the fact that the monitor needs time to warm up. Even when a computer monitor is set to sleep perhaps during lunch hour, it takes a while before the person running that computer will have a truely accurate representation of the monitors color. It can take up to an hour, although that might be stretching it, for some monitors to come into its nominal color settings. The best thing to do, is make sure that energy saver mode does not come on, until you turn off the monitor at night, or set it up in the control panels to come on during non-work hours.

Next item is ambient lighting in the studio, room, or lab. This includes any flourescent lighting, daylight, reflections from an external source like a lamp, anything that might throw a color hue. I had a friend once who had an accountant type lamp for the desk, the ones with the green glass lamp shade. You really want to find the lighting that makes you most comfortable to see in, and then keep that light consistent. Remember you are going for consistancy. If you color balance an image next to a window on a sunny day, and then rebalance that same image on a rainy day next to that same window, you will get different results. This doesn't mean that you cannot work next to a window, but you should keep a consistant strength of light that doesn't effect how you view an image. I strongly recommend a light box for viewing your printed image that you are using for comparison with the monitor, and keep the shades drawn with a steady source of illumination from above. Color Temperature of Vita-Lite Plus matches natural daylight at 5500K which can be ordered from any company specializing in lighting supplies. I personally prefer a 6500K light setting for photographic images, it just seems to emulate the printed image that much better.

Most people love to change the background on their computer desktop, I know I do. But this sometimes contradicts the eyes natural ability to judge color, especially when comparing an image with a multi-colored image behind it. But using nuetral grey not only reduces eye strain, it also causes all the colors in the monitors CRT to fire those red, green, and blue electrons in equal amounts, decreasing the amount of time needed to properly warm up your computer monitor. So get rid of that distracting background and replace it with a nice nuetral grey background.

Buy a monitor calibration kit and use it. It is well worth your time and expense. But be warned, if after adjusting your monitors settings, you find yourself adjusting your contrast or brightness settings, or perhaps a coworker does this for you, you will need to recalibrate your monitor once again. You cannot adjust these settings without taking your monitor out of calibration. Some people adjust monitors frequently, but unless you change your settings, I think once a month is sufficient. If you truely feel compelled to calibrate, then even every two weeks should be more than adequete. Make sure that when you are calibrating your monitor, that you degauss. This is an internal monitor function that destroys any built up magnetic fields that remain from previous work, or perhaps you have magnetic speakers near your monitor. This is just a precautionary action that will only aid you in perfecting that monitor calibration.

We have talked about warming up your monitor, lighting, your desktop background on your computer, calibration kits. Now let me go back and say that once all this is complete, find several images. You want images hard to print. Images with a lot of color and saturation, perhaps lots of sky or violet, a good greyscale image, and perhaps another image with difficult to print flesh tones. You want to find a variety of images and take a sampling of what each has to offer. Not just pick one image and base all your adjustments on it. So you now print up these images without any color adjustments and submit them to our lab as a file evaluation. We will print a 3.5x5 print of the image without any color correction, and a 3.5x5 print of the image after we have adjusted the density and color balance of your images. You will then take the corrected images by us, and use these to adjust the settings of your monitor. Your monitor should now be setup to match the color output of our Kodak Printer's.