Calibrate Your Monitor Colour Reproduction with Macbeth Colour Checker
If you are shooting travel photos digitally, then you need to make sure the colour monitor you are using to preview, process and review all your photos is reproducing colours accurately. If not so, it will affect all your image processing actions and even your camera setting! At the end of the day, all your favourite photos would not seem appealing to other viewers in other LCD / LED’s. The worst scenario is, some photographers don’t even know that their monitors’ RGB setting is out for as long as the period they shoot photos digitally!
In order to calibrate monitor’s colour reproduction, the best and trusty solution to most photographers is to use Spyder Datacolor colour calibration colorimeter. It calibrates colour monitor to create an accurate colour profile for your work station. If my eyes can be trusted, I prefer the second solution, which is to calibrate monitor manually by using our own naked eyes, with the help of this colour chart called Macbeth Colour checker. You can get this 8.5″ x 11″ chart from Amazon.
Thanks for this digital version of the chart from Dry Creek Photo. From top to bottom row, starting from left to right, here are the reference colours that most useful to match what we see most naturally everyday:
Row 1: Dark skin – Light skin — Blue sky —— Foliage —- Blue flower — Bluish green
Row 2: Orange – Purplish blue – Moderate red – Purple – Yellow green – Orange Yellow
Row 3: Blue ——- Green ———– Red ———– Yellow ——— Magenta ——— Cyan
Row 4: White — Neutral 8 —- Neutral 6.5 — Neutral 5 —- Neutral 3.5 —— Black
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First, you can download an electronic copy of this colour chart here or just click the image above. Then grab a X-rite Macbeth Colour checker and compare all those colours with the one displayed in your LCD / LED screen. Now you know how accurate is your monitor in reproducing most commonly used colours. If your monitor’s colour is too far out, re-calibrate its RGB setting with either its own menu setting or Windows 7’s colour calibration feature in Control Panel’s Hardware category.
I would prefer to adjust the monitor RGB setting in LCD’s menu, rather than to create additional colour profile in Windows. Why? To me, by adjusting monitor’s menu, setting is permanent and universal while creating colour profile in Windows might not work properly in certain photo processing software. This is why I mentioned earlier that I prefer to use Macbeth Colour Checker over Spyder 3 to calibrate my monitor’s colour reproduction, if my eyes can be trusted… 🙂 – Travel Feeder, your ultimate photo travel blog
About The Author
Cecil Lee
The author is an avid traveler and photography hobbyist who loves to share with others his travel and photo-taking experience in many popular tourist destinations around Europe, Asia and Australasia. Read the exciting stories with many photos captured on his journeys.
