CALIBRATING YOUR MONITOR

If you're shopping for fabric on the Internet, it's nice to know that the colors you're seeing on your monitor are reasonably accurate. True monitor calibration can be a somewhat time-consuming process. The following instructions aren't intended to teach you how to precisely calibrate your monitor, but rather to help you determine if you're " in the ballpark" .

Below are two charts. The first is designed to help you check your monitor's brightness and contrast. The chart should appear as a series of grey squares, with no noticeable bluish or reddish cast. It should fade from pure black on the left to pure white on the right (the rightmost square should be " invisible" against the white page). The transition from square to square should be gradual and even. If two or more of the squares appear to be the same shade, this indicates that your monitor is out of adjustment. Generally speaking, it's best to set your monitor's contrast to its highest setting, and then adjust the brightness control to achieve an even transition between the squares (consult your manual for details on how to do this, as it varies from monitor to monitor).



The next chart is simply a collection of very pure colors. It runs from black to red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, and finally yellow. Each color should appear pure and untinted. If you notice that all the colors seem to have a particular hue (often, a poorly adjusted monitor will give everything a slightly greenish cast, for instance), then you need to adjust your monitor's color settings. Again - consult your manual for specific instructions.





Obviously this is a VERY basic test of your monitor's color accuracy. Precisely calibrating your monitor is much more involved than we can explain in this quick guide. Many graphics programs (such as Adobe Photoshop and Jasc Software's excellent Paint Shop Pro) come with utilities for doing a far more complete adjustment.

MONITOR CALIBRATION UTILITIES

For those who don't own Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro, we highly recommend downloading and running one of the following excellent calibration utilities. The first one, for Windows users, is called QuickGamma:

http://quickgamma.de/indexen.html

For you Mac users, there's SuperCal (works with both OS 9 and OS X):

http://www.bergdesign.com/supercal/

If you're interested in more in-depth information, you may want to take a look at the following links:

http://www.help4web.net/setup/mire.html
http://epaperpress.com/monitorcal/
http://www.bryce-alive.net/calibrate/
http://www.mindspring.com/~woharris/cal.htm
http://www.poynton.com/Poynton-color.html