Displa圜al and Argyll are built around the idea of ICC profiling, common to color management with computers for many years.
The refresh rate of your display is variable, the software may be scaling your image making sharpening difficult to evaluate, and the interaction of operating system, video card, and ICC metadata is a precarious one that’s subject to change without you realizing it. That said, there are still many ways a computer display can show inaccurate color: Google “Quicktime gamma shift” or “Premiere render washed out” for multiple evidences of that fact.
Any professional colorist will still have a good external display, but for the budding amateur, the computer GUI display is much better than it used to be and don’t let the professionals bully you into dropping $40k on a display (until you need to master HDR content that is…). That said, many video NLE’s (like Resolve) are now (properly) supporting ICC profiles and can therefore provide a “calibrated” image on your computer screen. Proper video calibration expects that the video software is less intelligent and can’t do this realtime conversion for you, typically requiring an external, video-specific display and a color conversion between that display and your compute, usually in the form of a “LUT”. Photoshop) converts colors in your document to look correct on your display as you work on the image. Photo applications reference an “.icc profile”, often held by the OS, which basically outlines what your given display can show–it’s like an evaluation or report card of your monitor’s capabilities. For a long time I wondered how professional photographers could work with ‘cheap’ computer monitors, but basic rec709 colorists couldn’t. If you’re a videographer, especially one dabbling in color, you’ve likely been told you need an external “reference monitor” to do any serious grading. If you’re a photographer, you’re used to working off your computer monitor to do your edits. Photo Calibrationįirst, let’s talk about what we’re actually ‘calibrating’.
We’ll later explore how the umbrella term ‘calibration’ has come to generally mean “get my image to look right” but this act of adjusting a display’s controls to the best possible starting point is only the beginning of a full calibration and profiling solution. This process of using knobs and dials to ‘calibrate’ or ‘tune’ a display is similar to how we’ll use the term ‘calibration’ here. It’ll also help you understand the purpose of this colorful set of rectangles you’ve likely seen before. This is a good place to start and what many old-school industry insiders will think of when they hear the word “calibration”.
Many people are familiar with the classic “ SMPTE color bars“, a hallmark of the NTSC signal verification days.īeing acquainted with the basics of calibration with SMPTE bars doesn’t hurt and it’s pretty easy.
look at your Frame export on an iPhone screen to gauge if your work looks the same as it did on your computer display. That said, one good approach is to view your export on different devices, i.e. Apple computers also have a decent track record of looking decent out-of-the box (part of the reason I recommend them in the ‘computer’ section), but you’ll need to understand the concept of ‘color management’ to get predictable and trustworthy results. Use the Frame.io app (never the browser!) and have them set brightness to about 60% in a normal viewing environment. Fortunately, as of iPhone 11, iPhones are pretty standardized and high enough quality that, for basic SDR content, you can give a client a great idea of finished color. The inevitable experience of every colorist involves sending colored material to a client for review and getting feedback based more on the inaccuracy of their display than of your color correction. Characterization requires measuring the unique color response of an individual display.ĭisclaimer: Calibration is important, but it’s also very easy to get it wrong and make things worse.
Characterization “Calibration” is a lot like what you do with the SMPTE bars in the video above: using the display-provided controls to adjust things to get the display as close as possible.