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Features

Is Your Campus Color Smart?

1/17/2007

By David Nagel

Software solutions
The most cost-effective solution to creating consistent and at least somewhat accurate color across multiple displays is software. It's definitely not the most color-effective, but it's there for you if your institution doesn't have the resources to invest in hardware solutions, which we'll get to below.

Software solutions are generally built into a computer's operating system software. (If you do not have a software color calibration application built into your computers, you'll find links to free software below.) On a Mac running Mac OS X, for example, you go into System Preferences and click on the Displays button. From there, click on the Color button, and you'll see the currently selected color profile for the display, as well as a few buttons: Open Profile, Delete Profile and Calibrate.

Now, on this particular machine, I'm already hardware-calibrated, but I'll highlight some of the steps in software calibration anyway.

To begin calibrating the display, click the Calibrate button. A new window will pop up. There you'll see an option called 'Expert Mode.' Don't be put off by this. You can't get a decent calibration without checking this option. So check it, and then continue.

The next screen that pops up begins the actual calibration process. Here you simply adjust the little buttons (or crosshairs, depending on the system) until the image in the center disappears into the background. Blurring your eyes can help a bit with this.

 

Then you continue through several more of these calibration steps until you get to the screen that asks you to set the gamma. As I'm (obviously) on a Mac, I set mine to 1.8, which is the standard for Mac systems. For whatever reason, it also happens to be a good gamma for approximating printed output, which is one of the reasons graphic designers use Macs. If you're on Windows, the standard is 2.2, which also happens to be good if you work in video that will eventually make its way onto standard NTSC televisions.

Once you've set the gamma, it's time to move on to the target white point, which is generally best left at the native value of whatever display you're using.

 

And, finally, when you're done, the calibration process you've just gone through results in something called a 'color profile.' The color profile is extraordinarily important in that it conveys information to printers and other devices—including other computer displays—about the way your monitor communicates color to the human eye. Hence you will (or ought to) get more accurate prints out of your computer. And, when you share images between computers—assuming you bother to embed a color profile in those images and assuming the other computers are also calibrated—the colors displayed on the different monitors will (or ought to) appear quite similar.

The critical factor here for a classroom environment is that all the displays used in the classroom be calibrated similarly. And, when using software, that generally means that it ought to be one person doing all the calibrating because, of course, a second person might interpret colors during the calibration process differently, and so you'd wind up with displays whose colors once again don't match.

So the software solution can be tedious and time-consuming for a single person, especially given that displays need to be calibrated on a regular basis—monthly at least—in order to maintain color consistency. The reason? All displays experience color drift over time. This can be accelerated by various factors. But no matter how quickly or slowly it happens, it is inevitable that it will.

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