How to Calibrate Your Monitor: The Comprehensive Beginner's Guide

[Julio Franco]

Monitor calibration is very important to a creative professional's workflow, but pretty much anyone can benefit from it. Calibration will deliver color accuracy and correct problems with white balance, gamma, and oversaturation. It'll also help color matching multiple monitors for a consistent experience.

Read the full article here.

https://www.techspot.com/guides/2055-how-to-monitor-calibration/

 

[amghwk]

I just do what most people do - gaming, browsing and word-processing. (In that order.)

Never bothered about "color accuracy" or color calibration. If it looks good to me, that's all that matters. (I still look at the screens before buying, though. To find what I like.)

 

[Shadowboxer]

My monitor cost me £500 so spending £200 on a calibration tool is just too much. They should make an app that can do it on your smartphone!

Also, I don’t really understand shadow boost. I play mostly single player games so maybe I wouldn’t know. But I don’t really see how it might help someone cheat? It’s not like hiding in the shadows in any game I’ve played makes a player invisible.

 

[p51d007]

I'm lucky. My job is maintaining/repairing wide format toner & ink printers. I have to use them.
I have one printer, that weighs in at 1,300 pounds in weight, takes an entire day to set up because it has to be ACCURATELY balanced. I have free access to the I-one devices, which is handy when I get a new laptop, home PC and or monitor. Zip zip and calibrated.

 

[Evernessince]

Also, I don’t really understand shadow boost. I play mostly single player games so maybe I wouldn’t know. But I don’t really see how it might help someone cheat? It’s not like hiding in the shadows in any game I’ve played makes a player invisible.

It's really going to depend on the monitor and location they are playing. If you are playing in a brightly lit room it's going to be very hard to see anything in the darks unless you calibrate the mointor with the ambient light in mind.

If darks are very bright or grey / muddy on your monitor that means it's improperly calibrated. A good OLED can display very low light black detail.

 

[Nobina]

This doesn't make much sense for anyone except for the professionals.

 

[brucek]

I think the very first question for most people is what are the benefits (and trade-offs) of this process. As a non-professional, I primarily want my display to look pleasing to me. I'm also interested/concerned in the potential effects of blue light on my sleep cycle and long-term eye health. I'm not sure I'm convinced a fully accurate display is the one I'd find most enjoyable.

 

[Lew Zealand]

Also, I don’t really understand shadow boost. I play mostly single player games so maybe I wouldn’t know. But I don’t really see how it might help someone cheat? It’s not like hiding in the shadows in any game I’ve played makes a player invisible.

Shadow boost can give you a huge game-changing advantage in any game that uses a day/night cycle and really plugs the blacks at night. Ark:SE is one of those games. When I used to play it, night was a huge handicap, which is of course the intent of the devs. However with a bit of dark boost at night, it's just as easy to see as in the daytime. Huge disadvantage negated.

 

[Homerlovesbeer]

Thanks for the guide Tim. Fantastic stuff!

 

[Shadowboxer]

Shadow boost can give you a huge game-changing advantage in any game that uses a day/night cycle and really plugs the blacks at night. Ark:SE is one of those games. When I used to play it, night was a huge handicap, which is of course the intent of the devs. However with a bit of dark boost at night, it's just as easy to see as in the daytime. Huge disadvantage negated.

I just tried it in minecraft and wow yes you can actually see in the dark. I was able to explore caves without placing torches. However, it was disgusting to look at and ruined the fun. Il leave it switched off I think.

I’ve not really played much ARK. But I can’t see many games benefiting from this from a competitive standpoint. Not as much as like turning off grass in pubg!

 

[theruck]

I will never buy an x-rite product again. bought their calibrator just to find out a year later that they do not support 64bit Mac OS when I had to update the OS I could dump their calibrator to the bin
anyway the product sucked. have 3 different monitors and after calibration all the monitors have still different colors

 

[ddferrari]

This doesn't make much sense for anyone except for the professionals.

Right, but for professionals, this does make sense. A lot of them are Techspot readers, too. I'm sure this well written article was useful for many.

 

[Namtrooper]

If I could borrow your colorimeter to calibrate my monitor once that would be greeeaat.

 

[Shadowboxer]

If I could borrow your colorimeter to calibrate my mo itor once that would be greeeaat.

Yeah, I’d appreciate a rental of some kind. You only need it once. You can rent expensive power tools quite easily, I don’t see why the same couldn’t be done with something like this.

Or maybe an app on a smartphone. It may not be as accurate as a proper tool but surely would probably be able to do some kind of a job. Pretty certain the latest Oneplus has a colour sensor too.

 

[Lew Zealand]

I just tried it in minecraft and wow yes you can actually see in the dark. I was able to explore caves without placing torches. However, it was disgusting to look at and ruined the fun. Il leave it switched off I think.

I’ve not really played much ARK. But I can’t see many games benefiting from this from a competitive standpoint. Not as much as like turning off grass in pubg!

Ha, I've used it Minecraft for the same reason and yeah while it works, the effect is way more visually annoying than just making torches. And torches prevent mob spawns.

If you're playing Ark on a PVE or especially a PVP server, the advantage of being able to see at night or in dark parts of the map is really big. In fact, I remembered wrong. The game actually has a hotkey (F9) to bump the in-game Gamma to wherever setting you want (I usually used about 4). And then as a server admin you can disable this option for all players if you don't want people to (ab)use it. But since you're making this change in the game engine and not afterwards on a monitor, it actually looks very good, unlike Minecraft.

Like you said there really aren't any other games I've played which obtain any benefit from shadow boost, just Ark.

 

[Antelope]

Hi. I'm using my system for photo editing and retouching. I have a Datacolor Spyder5 Studio kit. Why would I use DisplayCal rather than the Datacolor software that comes with Spyder?
Thanks.