Are you sufficiently calibrated?

I’ve been working through Bruce Fraser’s (et. al.) Real World Color Management over the past few weeks. It is relentlessly geeky, especially in the Profiles chapters. If your professional or avocational life has anything to do with photographic output in the digital realm, I’m afraid you have to read this book. It’s your homework.

I’m going to invoke the "Fair Use" clause of copyright law and share with you a calibration check for your monitor that’s in the book. Perhaps it will convince you of the value of buying it. The question here is, how good is your monitor calibration?

An important point of monitor profiling (the most basic piece of color management) is that there are really two parts. Your hockey puck that reads all those color squares on the screen does two things: it asks you to make adjustments to your monitor (black and white points, color temp, gamma), and then it creates a profile. But is that initial calibration accurate? And how good is your monitor? Here’s a way to check the black point, the hardest part of the calibration regime.

Get your viewing environment in order. Generally this means you want to be in a dim environment, with no ambient light on the monitor. In Photoshop, first set up your colors so that you’re seeing the RGB information that your monitor is displaying. Go View—Proof Setup and choose Monitor RGB at the bottom of the list. Make a new file, roughly the size of your monitor resolution (say 1000x700 pixels). Be sure it’s in RGB. Fill the background with black. Press the "F" key a couple of times so that you have a full screen mode with a black background.

With the Marquee Tool, make a square box inside the image. Press Ctrl+H to hide the marching ants. Press "Tab" to hide all your open palette windows. You want an empty, black screen. Press "Ctrl+L" to open a Levels adjustment. On the Output Levels at the bottom of that box, highlight the zero black setting. Drag that box off the edge of your screen so it doesn’t interfere with the view. Using your up arrow key, see when you start seeing a change from your background black.

It’s a brutal test of your monitor. I’m on a Lacie Blue CRT, and I was able to see a difference at level 2. A typical threshold is level 5 or 7. If you’re not seeing anything until 12, your black point is set too low. If you’re seeing a color cast, you’ve got multiple adjustment problems.