Calibrating The Color Of Website - Why And How?

By Author: Samuel White
Total Articles: 37
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Color shift across different monitors is usually ignored by most of the web designer but never by the perfectionists. The features of the screen and the lighting conditions also vary, and because of this the orange color may look a bit similar to red. A perfectionist designer will always try to strive for accuracy at colors. Most of the designers do not know the issues related to consistency in color and so they have to be made aware about its relevance.

For most of the casual observer of the web site, a slight change in the shade can go unnoticed but this is usually not true for those who seriously consider the digital images. JPEG images of the best quality consume a lot of bandwidth. Same is the case with the PNG icons with 256 colors. If during the design process, a monitor without any calibration is used for creating the image, inconsistency is going to creep in after some time.

Emergence of Color Issues:

Earlier using a palette of 216 colors was considered the best way to get accurate colors. This was the in the 1990s when the monitors with 8 bit color were common. Now the situations have changed and ...
... the monitors with 24 bit color have become popular and common. Calibration that was simple once has now become more critical and complicated just because millions of colors can now be shown in each pixel. The hexadecimal codes define the combination of the three colors; blue, green, and red. This does not guarantee consistency in color.

Monitors vary:

The change in monitors is usually the cause of change in the color. The change in monitor is usually due to change in the manufacturer, model, age of the monitor and the time taken to warm it up, location of operation and technology like gamma.

Steps to calibrate the monitor:

The aim of calibration is to get rid of shift in the color and getting the tonal range of the monitor optimized. The shadows need to be rich and at the same time exhibit the niceties. The brightness of the highlighted things should be of a mediocre kind; neither too cool nor too warm. Some of the steps for calibrating the monitor are as follows.

The monitor should be first warmed up for at least half an hour.

Appropriate Gamma range (gamma1.8-2.2, 5000-9500 degree K)

The best black and white points should be found

The color casts should be prevented by balancing the blue, green and red colors.

This process should be repeated every month.

If the CRT displays need to be calibrated, Adobe Gamma is a famous and fast solution. This tool is quite easy to use. This tool is available free when you buy Photoshop Elements or Photoshop. For calibrating the hardware one can also use Datacolor’s Spyder and QuickGamma (Windows)

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