Prepare For Monitor Calibration & Calibration Goals
Ok, before we start any calibration process, it's important to make sure all the basics are in place and that we're fully ready to go. A little bit of preparation can save a lot of pain!
PLEASE, DO NOT SKIP THIS STUFF! Just about every support request we get comes because people have skipped over some part of this preparation.
Here's a check-list of what should be in place before you start any monitor calibration process.
At the end, we also discuss what are the goals of calibration - i.e. what are you actually trying to achieve with calibration - and give you some specific scenario examples that may be useful.
Monitor Connections
You need, at least, one power and one video connection to your monitor.
In addition, you may need a data connection as well.
Lack of a data connection is the most commonly missed step (with direct hardware calibration monitors), so definitely do check this!!
Note the video connection should always be direct from your computer to the monitor. Do NOT use a hub - most hubs will interfere with calibration.
(If you must use a hub, first get things working with a direct connection, i.e. without a hub, then once all is confirmed working, plug in to your hub afterward and test everything is still working properly. And if you then later receive errors during calibration or validation → go back to a direct connection!).
Direct Hardware Calibration requires
Data Connection
Video Connection
Your monitor should be connected directly to your computer using a modern, digital connection - this is the connection that video data travels over.
Read our information about monitor connectors if you need advice on this.
Data Connection
A separate data connection is needed if:
- You ARE using a monitor with direct hardware calibration support (Eizo ColorEdge, BenQ SW & PV, NEC PA)
- You are NOT using USB-C to USB-C (i.e. both ends are USB-C) - for your video connection
(if you are, i.e. USB-C at both ends, then this one cable carries both video and data). - AND/OR if your monitor has downstream USB ports, or an SD card reader (and again, you're not using USB-C at both ends for your connection).
If the calibration software finds it can't make a data connection to your monitor, you will get a message:
- With Eizo ColorNavigator or NEC SprectraView - saying something similar to 'adjustment capable monitor not found'
- With BenQ PaletteMaster Elements either a message 'Make sure your BenQ Monitor is connected with a USB cable', or a rather obscure message about 'Are the FTDI drivers installed?'
If you see any of these messages, it means the vendor software can not communicate with the monitor, so go back and check the notes above, and your connections again.
(A good trick, if your monitor has USB ports or an SD card reader, is to plug a known working USB drive/SD card into one of these, and see if that device comes up on your desktop - if not, you don't have a working data connection!).
Multiple Monitors
If you're dealing with multiple monitors (most commonly a laptop with a secondary screen), remember that you must not be in 'Mirror' mode (as then the computer can't tell which monitor to of the two identical displays to manage the colour for).
You must use 'Extended Desktop' mode, or use ONLY the external monitor, turning off the internal laptop display.
How to do do this varies a lot from machine to machine and across operating systems, but there are good tutorials on YouTube etc., if you're not familiar with multiple monitor use.
Clean Up
Hardware Clean-up
Your monitor's panel must be spotlessly clean.
Seems minor, but we want to make sure our calibrator measures the colour in the most accurate way possible.
Don't use any old cleaning method for this, always use the official good stuff. And be gentle - your monitor's panel surface is delicate!
Software Clean-up
Start by uninstalling any old monitor calibration software you may have previously used.
Note: this includes any related tray/menubar/startup utilities - many software uninstall processes seem to leave these behind. Have a good poke around your computer. On a PC, this means, at least, checking your Startup Items (via Task Manager) and on a Mac checking Login Items (there are guides all over the internet for how to do this on both Mac and PC). It is not uncommon to find things-left-over in there....clean up, reboot your machine, and then double check all such things are gone.
Common problems from not doing this include messages about software not being able to connect to your calibrator - this will be because some legacy software on your system is hogging the connection to the device. Or calibrations failing validation because some old utility is loading an old profile into your video card in the background. These issues are very common but also easily avoided if you start with a proper clean-up!
If you're calibrating multiple monitors, you can then carefully later re-install other calibration software, if you must, but the cleaner you start the less likely your are to hit weird issues.
Operating System & Video Settings
We need to make sure your computing environment is correctly set up. There's a few things to check.
Disable HDR modes
Check your video card settings and display preferences to make sure HDR modes are turned off.
Note that, annoyingly, MacOS Catalina and above have HDR turned on by default. This is just stupid.
Here's their advice on turning HDR on/off:
Choose Apple menu > System Preferences, then click Displays. In Display Settings, make sure that High Dynamic Range is selected. This setting appears only on third-party displays that support HDR. If you don't want to use HDR, deselect this checkbox.
Check HDMI Video Levels
If you have connected your monitor using an HDMI cable (ideally, use USB-C or DisplayPort if you can, instead) - then make sure your video card is outputting full range RGB (0 to 255) and not 'limited range' or 'video' colour (16 to 235) to your monitor. This is normally done in the video card utilities/driver section.
Disabled interfering operating system features
We don't want your screen's appearance to be modified in any way during the calibration process, so at this time you should also:
- Very important: Disable any adaptive modes like 'True Tone', 'Night Light', 'Night Shift' etc. (Found under System Preferences -> Displays)
- Disable your screen saver (or set the time of activation out to an hour)
- Disable any monitor power management that might turn off or dim your screen (or again, set out the activation to an hour)
- Disable any other automatic colour or brightness adjustment features you can find, anywhere in your system.
- Disable anything else that might suggest it modifies your monitor's appearance dynamically (game modes and so on).
Once calibration is complete, you can of course turn your screen saver and power management settings back to where they were (but leave all those other adaptive modes permanently off!).
Special Notes On
Apple XDR Displays
Apple have a new breed of monitors with their Liquid Retina XDR Displays. These now offer a variety of pre-calibated 'Reference' modes that somewhat complicate calibration.
These are completely different to calibrate than almost all other monitors.
Please make sure you're using Calibrite Profiler (our comprehensive guide to Calibrite Profiler is here), rather than the older i1Profiler/ccProfiler - as the new software has updated optimisations specifically for these displays.
We have a full and comprehensive guide to calibrating these new Liquid Retina XDR displays below:
Keep Up To Date
You should install / update your calibration software to the latest version.
This is important - with operating system and video card updates, things can and do change, so it's important to keep up to date with your calibration software too.
Downloads:
Eizo ColorNavigator - latest version here.
BenQ Palette Master Ultimate - latest version here.
BenQ Palette Master Elements - latest version here.
NEC Spectraview - latest version here.
Calibrite Profiler / ccProfiler / i1Profiler - latest versions here.
(Note these applications will actually also install drivers for compatible calibrators, thus you don't generally ever need to install the software that came with your external calibrator if this is the only monitor you are calibrating).
Think About What You're Doing...
We're almost ready to start. Now, let your monitor warm up, ideally for half an hour, before you start.
This is a good moment to think about what we're actually trying to achieve with calibration.
Calibration Goals
It's important to be aware of what we're trying to achieve through calibration.
At a basic level, we're trying to make your monitor as accurate as possible for the display of colour. But what IS accurate? As with just about everything, the answer depends on context.
In reality, we're trying to make your monitor the best possible tool
for you to produce your work accurately. In practice, this generally means making
your monitor be the best predictor of the final output form of your work.
Here's a few possible common scenarios to consider:
Still Images - Print
If you're working on still images, and the final destination is print - be it fine art print, or commercial - we want to match the screen's display as closely as possible to this final output, so that we can get as close to 'working directly on the print' as is possible - that is, what we're seeing is very much like the final print, so that any adjustments we make are reflected on the screen just as they will be in the final print.
This generally means that we want to, for example, match the white tone of the monitor fairly closely to the white tone of our paper. And we want to drastically reduce the monitor's high native contrast to something that is a better visual match to the much lower contrast of print (prints don't use power to emit light, they only reflect light, so where modern monitors might have contrast of 1000:1 or more, prints will at most have about 200:1 contrast).
Still Images - Web
On
the other hand, perhaps we're preparing our work for screen output -
most like on the internet. In this case, we want our monitor to be a
predictor of that output (in as much as this is possible since not
everyone has such a lovely monitor on their desk as an Eizo ColorEdge).
In general this means full contrast, relatively high brightness, and picking sensible defaults such as a whitepoint of 6500K and a gamma of 2.2. We might want to set up two calibrations for this - one with the narrower, sRGB gamut of older monitors and phones/tablets etc, and another with a modern wide gamut like P3 (as found e.g. on most current Macs). We can't match every monitor in the world, but if we choose sensible defaults and get things looking good on those, we should be in good shape generally.
Video Output - Web
If you're producing video
output for the web, you'll want to keep things very standard most
likely. The bulk of footage in this context is HD - 1920 by 1080, and in
the Rec.709 colour space. Reasonably high brightness and contrast,
but people don't have their computer screens jacked up to quite the
levels of their home TVs.
Video Output - TV UHD
Modern
video standards are moving to 4K (well, UHD 3840 by 2160) - and also to
new colour standards like Rec.2020. Plus there's HDR to consider.
TVs in real lounge rooms are invariably very bright, very contrasty and very saturated.
And TV gamma is often more like 2.4 in practice. If we're mastering
for this environment, then we want to make sure our stuff looks good
when viewed on these screens.
Ready To Go!
Having updated, cleaned, polished, and thoroughly checked your system, you should be good to go.
Please follow on to one of our comprehensive guides to calibration:
Direct Hardware Calibration
Vendor Specific Calibration Systems
Classic Software Calibration
