Are you a photographer and not using a screen that has been calibrated?

What would you say if you buy 1 kg of apples and you come home and you got only 650 grams. What if your car tells you you are driving 70 km/h but in reality it is 110 km/h? How can you be sure the colors of your photos are correct? By calibrating. It’s as simple as that.

We look at screens every day. A monitor, laptop, smartphone, tablet or even the digital screen in your car.

Let's assume 100% is the maximum of colors a screen can display. What if your smartphone only shows 27% of these colors?

The picture above is the color spectrum. The complete area are the colors a human eye can see. The purple triangle is the Prophoto color space while the black triangle is the range of colors defined as sRGB standard. Sadly a lot of screens aren’t even capable of showing all colors defined in the sRGB standard. Photos on my website are uploaded in sRGB color space. When I edit my images I do not work in sRGB. I use AdobeRGB because my 4K 32 inch monitor supports 99,5% of the AdobeRGB color space, a much wider color space compared to sRGB.

I export in my photos in sRGB. While AdobeRGB supports more colors it is not always a good idea to use this color space while exporting in this format (as JPG). Some browsers but also other (viewing) software do not support this standard and this results in flat colors. It just doesn’t look nice.

When we want our photos printed we can simulate the colors on our screen how they would look like on the print itself. We do this by importing the provided color profiles (of the paper) and then we activate it in software like photoshop, lightroom, capture one pro,….

In general, newspapers use low quality paper. If we simulate this kind of paper in our software you will see a lot of colors are out of gamut. In general: better paper results in better colors. This is logical. Rough paper absorbs more ink and when printed they flow into each other. High quality paper is very smooth so the ink does not mix that much during printing.

When we simulate the paper in our software we adjust the colors using the color profile of the printer and try to match the colors as close as possible. This is called soft proofing.

Not all print services provide the icm files (image color management) or icc files. Some print offices adjust the colors automatically. Sometimes you must deactivate this choice in the order proces.

You have to make sure the colors on your screen are correct!

If you have an iPad you can compare the photos on your ipad with your computermonitor. iPads are very good in color accuracy and well calibrated out of the factory. In general the colors of an iPad are mostly correct.
If you need to buy a monitor make sure you buy at least a monitor supporting 100% sRGB.

You also need calibration hardware and software. I use a Xrite i1display pro and I calibrate my screens using the provided software at least 4 times a year.

The process is very simple. Install the calibration software, run it and it will guide you through the process. It takes a few minutes to generate the color profile. During calibrating your screen will show different colors being measured and then compared to the ideal color value. When finished, a color profile is provided and stored on your computer.

The photo below is the screen and calibration hardware I am using now.

Displaycal is freeware and does an excellent job. You can use this as an alternative.

Picture below is the result of my Dell 3216Q: the color gamut (colored lines) of my screen is way more than the sRGB standard. (dashed lines)

http://www.displaycal.net

I do not understand why some big clothing companies use color graded photos where the colors do not match the real colors at all. It’s an artistic choice.