January 17, 2004

Which photographer hasn't spent hours upon hours color calibrating his or her monitor? Has wasted tons of money in precious ink and photo paper just because the monitor showed something quite different from what the printer spit out? And who hasn't eventually settled for a satisfying-but-not-perfect scanner-monitor-printer setup, only because the calibration process is so damn torterous?

Yes. It's true. We all dream of a world, where every new imaging device we hook up to our computer automatically goes and checks in with the other devices, downloads their color profiles and completely eliminates the need for calibration. We wish they could be a happy little family, constantly chatting about grey scales and saturation and brightness, while taking care of us and making sure that what we see on our slides, prints out exactly so on our photo printer.

It's a dream however. The fact remains that unless you're willing to spend hundreds of dollars on expensive calibration software and even hardware, you're doomed to mediocrecy.

The good news however is that the fine people from the New York Times have recently put together a little help section for us poor calibration-challenged suckers:

- A tutorial on monitor calibration

- Test pattern of color and grayscale squares to look at while you adjust controls on the front of your monitor

- Another test pattern

- PassMark's MonitorTest for Windows, an inexpensive programs that put your monitor through tests to improve its picture (free for 30 days, after that $15)