Color Calibration
Mostly Samsung and Dell displays are usually over-saturated while Acer, Lenovo are pretty dull. It’s fine if you can live with it but if it annoys you, try Color Calibration Software. But which is the best whether the costly one comes with hardware tools or the software alone, here we are gonna find it out.
But before we begin....
The important thing to understand is
the term Color Calibration. Color Calibration rectifies your monitor’s color, brightness,
and contrast are accurate or to do changes on it. For example, let us consider
the color Blue which has hex code as #0000ff on two different monitors. Hence
different displays create different shades of blue because of different brightness
and contrast ratio on them. But after color calibration, the displays should
output identical color.
1. Windows Native
The best and basic way to color
calibrate your screen is via the inbuilt Windows color calibrator. In start
menu search“Calibrate Display Color”.
This good old Windows 7 color calibration tool, it is one of the few tools
which are left untouched in Windows 10. The native calibration tool will walk
you through certain steps to adjust gamma correction to font visibility. Follow
the on-screen instructions to adjust the gamma, brightness, contrast, and color
balance. The good thing about this
native tool is that it let you view the screen changes before and after
calibration.
While this tool is fair enough for
personal usage. The instructions mentioned during brightness and contrast
test are pretty small and not clear. Lagom LCD Test as it gives better clarity in each and every step.
You can have QuickGamma if native windows calibration is
exhaustive and as the name suggests configuring your Gamma settings are pretty quick.
Gamma deals with the brightness of the color which decides on hue and
saturation. The UI feels like Winamp has come back to life with a 90-degree
flip.
The
app is pretty basic. On the top, you have the option to modify Gamma Settings
of RGB values. You have the option to choose between RGB or EDID RGB. Based on
facts EDID RGB helps you to gain values from an external display. That way, you
can connect your laptop to an external display and colors calibrate it
directly. Doesn’t require in-depth knowledge on color.
Calibrize
is a small tool which lets you calibrate the screen in three simple steps.
The
first step involves in setting the contrast and brightness of the display so
that a good balance between white and black is created. The second step
involves the gamma settings which adjust the brightness for the RGB values separately.
Finally, you save settings and calibrize overrides the default color settings.
4. Lagom
Color
Calibration software is highly dependent on personal eye and perception of
color. It can be subjective and chances are high when you deal with a single
image on your screen. Now, this won’t be much of a problem if your work never
leaves your monitor but if that ain’t the case, you should try Lagom. Lagom is
a web tool, which means it’ll work on Mac and Linux as well.
Lagom is different from the type of software we have discussed above. It’s more of like a reference tool for you while color calibration. It goes through a set of 15 images to help you decide the perfect Brightness, contrast, and RGB gamma settings. Addition of text helps you better to understand your display’s refresh rate and response time. You can also test different viewing angles of your monitor and decide the best viewing angle.
5. DisplayCAL
DisplayCAL is the most advanced software on this list. It is
available for free and is open source as well. Moreover, it requires input from
a dedicated Colorimeter for the display color values. So, it won’t be able to
color calibrate for you on its own.
The
best thing about the tool is it can decide the best color correction values for
you based on the inputs. It has a variety of inbuilt presets that generate
Whitepoint values, Tone Curve, etc. It also has the option to apply LUT on your
display which really helps if you have a “.cube” file for various displays that
have different display technology. This really helps in maintaining the color
consistency between LCDs and LEDs.
Download (DisplayCAL)
Wrapping Up
Lagom
with Calibrize should be the best option
to color calibrate your displays. You should color calibrate your displays once
in a while as the monitor ages.
To color calibrate on Mac, you can
use the built-in Display Calibrator Assistant found under
Display option in the system preferences. Or use a standalone app like SuperCal which
doesn’t require any additional hardware. If you are an Android user who edits a
lot of pictures, check out Color
Calibrator.
For any issues or queries, let me
know in the comments below.
Works fine, really a cool application
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