Color calibration should definitely be an essential part of every photographer’s workflow. Without proper color calibration, it is impossible to tell whether the colors that are displayed by your monitor are truly accurate and whether what you see on your monitor will match the print. There are many ways to calibrate devices and the process can be fairly simple or very complex, depending on how accurate you want to reproduce the colors and whether you are also printing your work in-house. Simple calibration is just calibrating your LCD or CRT monitor through free software and affordable calibration hardware, while “very complex” means an end-to-end professional-grade calibration and color profiling, which requires a very concise color calibration of both the display and the printer. Obviously, professional calibration is a time-consuming and expensive process, so I will only focus on a simple calibration of your monitor that you use today for your photography needs.

1) Why is calibration important?

One of the big misunderstandings about calibration, is that people think that calibration is only needed for printing. Wrong! Calibration is needed for everything – from viewing other people’s work online to processing your own images in Adobe Photoshop or Lightroom. If your monitor is not calibrated, you are most likely not seeing everything in the image. For example, a smooth and beautiful sunset might appear as pale and gradient streaks of light or a black and white picture might appear too dark or too light.

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