LCD default colour rendering can range from good (the best screens are factory calibrated) to utterly awful. Colour dominances are frequent and lately there has been a particular trend for more bluish colours and whites with reddish tinges.
More accurate colours in just a few clicks
First of all, it's important to remember that the profiles we have here only work for screens where settings like brightness and contrast haven't been adjusted, though we'll occasionally tell you if you need to. Our profiles are designed for monitors 'out of the box'. Adjusting a setting inevitably has an impact on the quality of the display, so you usually have to calibrate it every time you use it, or go back to the factory settings. It's also important to remember that an ICC profile is only valid for one particular combination of a screen and a graphics card, but we've tried our profiles with enough computers and enough graphics cards to be confident that the results are sufficiently stable to publish the profiles that we create during our tests.
By default, monitors display colours that range from relatively accurate at best to absolutely terrible. One shade often dominates, and recently, we've seen a tendency for blue to be too visible everywhere except in white, which looks red instead. Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to adjust screens like this by hand: if you turn down the amount of blue to even things out, you'll end up with red taking over instead.
Calibrating a screen takes two steps: first of all, you need to calibrate the device itself properly, and then create a profile that represents the settings you've chosen. Calibration allows you to get accurate colours, and it's almost magic: put the probe in front of the display, let it do its work and after just a few minutes the results are in. The problem is, the measuring equipment can be expensive. Our calibrator, the LaCie Blue Eye Pro, costs over £300!
The profiles we have here give you a taste of what this tool can do, so you can see what the benefits of calibration are. If you're a digital photography fan, they can often dramatically improve your results.
But don't think you've hit the jackpot just because you can download one of these profiles and save yourself £300. Ideally, a screen needs to be calibrated every month, every week, even every day for the strictest purists. The performance of your display and its internal components changes over time, and most of our profiles were created on new hardware. It's also essential to be able to set both the white point and black point before you start. That's why there's nothing like doing your own calibration, using your own computer, graphics card and monitor. All we're doing here is taking the first step—but for a lot of you, that could be a big improvement!
Results: Before and After
Before we start the calibration process, we measure the average discrepancy between the colours requested by the graphics card and those actually shown on screen. The result is a deltaE 94 score, which is based on an average of 18 colours. Here's how to interpret some typical scores:
average dE > 3.0: results are far from perfect, and disastrous above 5.0.
average dE < 3.0: satisfactory
average dE < 2.0: excellent and good for photo editing.
average dE < 1.0: this is almost perfect and we can safely say that the human eye won't detect any slight differences that remain.
A standard screen has an average dE between 2.0 and 7.0, and two-thirds of them are over 4.0.
(1).gif)
After calibration, every monitor does better and has a deltaE of 1.0, demonstrating the benefit of calibration.
Our Profiles
And it's these profiles that we provide you with. Our downloads are listed by manufacturer, from A to Z, and include both monitors and laptops.
Two final points:
First of all, it's important to remember that the profiles we have here only work for screens where settings like brightness and contrast haven't been adjusted, though we'll occasionally tell you if you need to. Our profiles are designed for monitors 'out of the box'. Adjusting a setting inevitably has an impact on the quality of the display, so you usually have to calibrate it every time you use it, or go back to the factory settings. It's also important to remember that an ICC profile is only valid for one particular combination of a screen and a graphics card, but we've tried our profiles with enough computers and enough graphics cards to be confident that the results are sufficiently stable to publish the profiles that we create during our tests.
By default, monitors display colours that range from relatively accurate at best to absolutely terrible. One shade often dominates, and recently, we've seen a tendency for blue to be too visible everywhere except in white, which looks red instead. Unfortunately, it's almost impossible to adjust screens like this by hand: if you turn down the amount of blue to even things out, you'll end up with red taking over instead.
Calibrating a screen takes two steps: first of all, you need to calibrate the device itself properly, and then create a profile that represents the settings you've chosen. Calibration allows you to get accurate colours, and it's almost magic: put the probe in front of the display, let it do its work and after just a few minutes the results are in. The problem is, the measuring equipment can be expensive. Our calibrator, the LaCie Blue Eye Pro, costs over £300!
The profiles we have here give you a taste of what this tool can do, so you can see what the benefits of calibration are. If you're a digital photography fan, they can often dramatically improve your results.
But don't think you've hit the jackpot just because you can download one of these profiles and save yourself £300. Ideally, a screen needs to be calibrated every month, every week, even every day for the strictest purists. The performance of your display and its internal components changes over time, and most of our profiles were created on new hardware. It's also essential to be able to set both the white point and black point before you start. That's why there's nothing like doing your own calibration, using your own computer, graphics card and monitor. All we're doing here is taking the first step—but for a lot of you, that could be a big improvement!
Results: Before and After
Before we start the calibration process, we measure the average discrepancy between the colours requested by the graphics card and those actually shown on screen. The result is a deltaE 94 score, which is based on an average of 18 colours. Here's how to interpret some typical scores:
average dE > 3.0: results are far from perfect, and disastrous above 5.0.
average dE < 3.0: satisfactory
average dE < 2.0: excellent and good for photo editing.
average dE < 1.0: this is almost perfect and we can safely say that the human eye won't detect any slight differences that remain.
A standard screen has an average dE between 2.0 and 7.0, and two-thirds of them are over 4.0.
Some examples of the dE of certain LCDs before calibration.
After calibration, every monitor does better and has a deltaE of 1.0, demonstrating the benefit of calibration.
Our Profiles
And it's these profiles that we provide you with. Our downloads are listed by manufacturer, from A to Z, and include both monitors and laptops.
Two final points:
- We've tested our profiles for accuracy with a variety of hardware configurations, so if you're curious, you can consult our article: Are our calibration profiles good for all computers?
- These profiles are only useful when manufactures fit the same hardware in all of the monitors in a series. It's not unknown for them to switch panel suppliers halfway through and in that case, you'll have to fall back on the default sRGB profile.
DigitalVersus on...