How to calibrate your screen and maintain accurate colors
If you are personally responsible for designing artwork or are part of a studio doing it, there are steps that can be taken to maintain consistent, accurate colors. If safeguards are not in place, designing across different devices, monitors, and printers can lead to inaccuracies in output. We’ve highlighted the three most important steps to protecting your colors, and your work.
1. Calibrate your monitor frequently, and give some thought to the environment you are working in.
2. Ensure that you are using color profiles correctly when working in Photoshop and InDesign. You can read more about color profiles in a recent xColor blog post: How to Set Up Working Spaces in Photoshop and InDesign.
3. Use a color management service to convert to the profile that your printer is using. A color management tool like xColor handles this type of conversion automatically.
In this blog post, we will include instructions on how to calibrate your monitor, and explore why monitor color calibration matters. Note that to achieve optimal results, you should consider investing in a high-end monitor, as well as a correctly lit office.
While it is not widely known, working on an uncalibrated monitor means your printed files will most likely not look as intended. This is because as your monitor ages, the hardware deteriorates and colors on-screen start to look different. When you are working in Photoshop, you may be using the standard working space sRGB. What this means is that the RGB values you enter are interpreted according to the scale of sRGB. The values R0 G0 B255 will look different across RGB working spaces, as the scales have different color ranges, meaning that the maximum blue, for example, will vary. When Photoshop decides what color to display on your screen, it considers the values and scale of sRGB and translates these to the RGB values it has to use on your monitor to show the actual colors that are denoted by the sRGB scale. As your monitor ages, it goes out of sync with how Photoshop and other editing tools assume that it operates. This means that as Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator etc convert from your designated working space to the corresponding monitor values, those values will be inaccurate. Depending on the quality of your monitor, your viewing conditions, and how long it has been since you calibrated the screen, the color shift could be very significant.
If you’re really serious about the accuracy of your artwork, you should actually be calibrating your monitor about every month. While you can adjust your monitor settings in System Preferences or similar, this only allows you to manually change settings based on your viewing experience. This method takes into account individual biases as well as other factors, such as the time of day, and is not going to result in a more accurate viewing experience. You may also have heard of online ‘monitor color tests’, where you adjust your screen based on images or colors presented to you. This will leave you with the same accuracy issues. The best calibration option is to purchase a screen calibration device. We recommend something like the Spyder5 series from Datacolor or the x1 series from X-Rite, but you can find many options online. The color calibration software that comes with the device will take you through the process, step-by-step, including brightness, contrast, gamma settings, color temperature, and some even adjust for ambient light. The calibration software will then generate a new ICC profile for your monitor that adjusts RGB and CMYK values against the actual range of your monitor. You will generate a new ICC profile every time you calibrate your screen, which your editing tools use when deciding how to display colors.
You can also consider the conditions under which you are viewing your artwork, direct light onto the screen for example will make it harder for your eye to distinguish the colors you are seeing, and you may be editing your colors too much or too little. This ambient light will change throughout the day. Try not to sit too close to a window, and make sure that the lightbulbs in your working environment are not overly tinted, e.g. very yellow or similar.
Finally, once your monitor calibration is complete, you can use a service like xColor to quickly and accurately convert your artwork to your printer profile. After conversion, proof your artwork to compare the output with what appears on screen. Converting to the printing profile is a necessary part of a workflow that ensures optimal print results, as printers have color ranges that are determined by the ink and paper used. However, editing in a standard working space means you can reuse the same artwork for different printers and print material. Note that editing in any working space is not accurate unless your monitor is calibrated.
Using a color management service to perform the final conversion, rather than letting Photoshop and InDesign handle it, will preserve your colors and images, and yield more consistent results. Since xColor is cloud-based, you can ensure your colors are protected while you’re working from any device, anywhere. New users of xColor can take advantage of a free 30-day trial. Head over to xColor.io to take a look!
