Summary
- Monitor calibration adjusts color to standard for accurate image reproduction.
- Not everyone needs it, mostly relevant for photographers, video editors, and graphic designers.
- For casual users, factory calibration and minor tweaks are sufficient; determine your needs based on playback accuracy or print color issues.
Your monitor isn’t as good as it could be out of the box. If you want it to reach its peak, you need to calibrate it, but how necessary is it? The answer is a little more nuanced than I’d first expected.
“Calibration” can mean different things in different context, and while it is a good idea to tune your monitor to your liking, not everyone needs a perfectly-calibrated monitor.
What Is Monitor Calibration?
Monitor calibration is simply adjusting your monitor’s color, brightness, and contrast to match some sort of standard. Calibration can be done in a number of ways, but it is mainly done using software or sometimes specialist hardware.
The main goal is to have the image on your screen match a pre-determined standard color space, such as sRGB or DCI-P3. Why? Because many people need what they see on their screen to match what that image would look like on another screen, or on paper. By calibrating your screen, you know that you’re seeing the image that the creator of that media intended, and you know that what you see when you create media is what other people will see.
Related
Who Actually Needs It?
While I think everyone should perform some level of calibration on their monitors, it’s not actually necessary unless you have a specific application or use case that relies on accurate colors such as:
- Photographers. You need to have an accurate screen to do color grading or to match what a photo will look like in print form.
- Video Editors. Like photographers, video editors have to do color work, unless you’re in a big production with a separate colorist.
- Graphic designers need accurate colors, or you’ll end up with, for example, branding elements that don’t use the correct color for your client’s business.
- Anyone who prints things for a living needs to calibrate their monitor to accurately show the colors of the print.
- Enthusiast gamers and media buffs who care about getting the most accurate reproduction of what the creators intended will want a calibrated display.
Basically, and I know this sounds obvious, if you care about your screen showing you the correct intended colors, you should care about calibration.
Why Most People Don’t Need to Calibrate Their Monitor
So, we can agree that monitor calibration is important for a big chunk of computer users, but that doesn’t mean you have to calibrate your monitor!
First, most modern monitors are already calibrated at the factory. This is why you’ll get a little calibration report certificate in the box, showing you how closely the monitor was tuned to match a specific color space. For consumer-grade monitors, this calibration is more than good enough for most people, and professional-grade monitors are factory-calibrated so that you can use them for photography or other professional color jobs. All you have to do is switch the monitor to its calibrated profile, and it should be good to go.
However, even if your monitor wasn’t calibrated at the factory, if you have no concrete reason it absolutely must be calibrated, then your subjective taste of what the image should look like trumps all. Even people who use a standard calibration will switch to their own custom color profile when doing something else. Not everyone likes the same brightness, contrast, or color settings. So if you’re happy with your image, don’t lose sleep over calibration.
Besides, most of the content you’re going to consume on your monitor is made for common color spaces like sRGB, which just about every monitor already adheres to, though of course not all of them do it with the same level of success.
Finally, the environment your screen is in can have a bigger impact on color accuracy. Ambient light and screen glare can matter more than any setting you tweak on the monitor, so addressing those instead might be more than you need.
When (and How) to Calibrate if You Really Need To
If you’re struggling with anything that depends on color accuracy, then you should calibrate your monitor. This happens when you try to print something, but the colors look different from what you see on screen. Also, if you have a monitor that’s not factory-calibrated, you can often see that colors don’t look right or consistent just with your naked eye. If the colors on the monitor don’t look right, and you don’t have a factory-calibrated profile to fall back on, then you need to do a manual calibration.
There are two ways to do it, with the first being the cheapest, fastest, and easiest. Both Windows and macOS have built-in monitor calibration tools. In Windows, simply search for “Calibrate display color” and run the applet that shows up in the results.
On a Mac, go to the Apple menu > System Settings > Displays > Preset > Calibrate Display, which will then open Display Calibrator Assistant.
In both cases, the tool will walk you through various adjustments until the display looks correct to you. However, you should understand that since this calibration method depends on your subjective judgment, it’s not perfect by any means.
If you want a precise, objective calibration, you’ll need to use a hardware color calibrator, such as from a company like Datacolor. This device goes on your screen and uses a sensor to check the image against a reference value. Once the calibrator has done its job, you’ll get a calibrated color profile for that specific monitor. These devices can be expensive, but you can always pay someone to do the calibrating for you, instead of buying the hardware for a monitor that you might have to calibrate once every few years.
Is Monitor Calibration Worth the Effort?
For most people, the answer is no. Unless you’re in a profession that relies on color accuracy, factory calibration and minor tweaks in monitor settings will be sufficient. If you’re happy with how your image looks, there’s no reason to calibrate it unless it actually causes issues with whatever you’re trying to accomplish.
