Hello again and thanks for stopping by Blog.Web Diligence for your weekly dose of Techy Fun. My name is Mat Pridham and I’ll be your guide for this tutorial (and most others) on calibrating your LCD Display under Mac OS X.
Your first logical question is "Why would I want to calibrate my LCD display?" The answer is simple; It’s quick, easily undone, will ultimately better your picture quality and will lessen the load on your Video Card.
So lets get started. First things first, we need to open System Preferences and then click the Displays icon.
Choose the Color Tab of the Display Preference Pane and then click the ‘Calibrate…’ button to the right.
From here we’re only a few steps away from a cleaner, more crisp looking display. The first step of the Display Calibrator you’ll be confronted with is the Introduction screen, for this tutorial we will leave ‘Expert Mode’ unchecked and click continue.
For those of you that are getting more advanced in your Image Retouching or even intermediate designers I will, at a later date, go into advanced monitor calibration but for now we’ll stick to the basics.
The second step, Target Gamma, is where the real change comes into effect. OS X, by default, ships with it’s target gamma set to 1.8, indeed all Macs since their inception have shipped with a 1.8 target gamma setting and for good reason. A 1.8 gamma settings provides a broader and smoother color palette, thus allowing content creators to more accurately represent their target color space.
Sadly, for the Lay-Person, this doesn’t do much good. Images displayed at 1.8 gamma look more faded and ‘washed-out’ than on the standard PC/TV gamma setting of 2.2. And as we’re constantly reminded by our Windows counter-parts, the computer world is dominated by Windows, and most designs online or otherwise are targeted for Windows PCs, not Macs.
Perhaps the biggest point to be made here, which effects the average user and pros alike is that the majority of displays (CRT and LCD) will have a Native gamma somewhere between 2.0 and 2.2, and choosing a lesser value requires a fair amount of adjustment on the part of the graphics card LUT and will tend to cause banding or posterization.
So if it’s not assumed already, we’ll set the Target Gamma to 2.2 as pictured below and click continue to the next step.
The third and last effective step is Target White Point. This settings is easy to set, as in most every situation you’ll want to keep a monitors Native White Point, which should be selected by default.
Lastly we’ll need to give our calibrated profile a name. Something simple like ‘<Default Name> Calibrated’ will do (replace ‘Default Name’ with whatever your profile was originally named).
For those of you who have switched from Windows to Mac recently, you’ll most likely be breathing a sigh of releif right about now, as all the websites you frequent will finally look as they once did. For those of you who have been long-time Mac users and are not used to the darker, more saturated version of your display, my advise is to hang in there for a couple of days. If you’re still unhappy with how things look after 2 days, though I’d be highly surprised if this were the case, it’s easy as pie to reverse the settings by selecting your original Color Profile in the display preference pane.
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