Colour Management

Here are some useful resources for getting colour management working.

Flat Screen TFT Monitors

Standard TFT screens all suffer with the same problem and that is that gamma varies with vertical angle of view. Norman Koren has a very useful page which describes methods for setting up a screen without using calibration hardware. The most useful item on Norman's page is the one shown to the right which is a pattern which appears evenly mid gray when the monitor gamma is 2.2.

My recommendation is to buy and use a calibrator as they are now available for a very reasonable sum. An example is the Pantone Huey which costs under £60. However, the Huey doesn't solve the problem of variation in angle of view giving a different gamma. The best solution I have found is to set your background image to a uniform mid gray with the gamma pattern in the center. Below are links to images which can be used on Windows, several standard resolutions are provided.

• 1920x1200
• 1680x1050
• 1280x1024
• 1152x864
• 1024x768

Buying an LCD monitor

There are a variety of monitors available over a very wide price range, at the high end are screens designed for professionals, and at the other end are the ones which ship with budget computer systems.

Professional Monitors

If you have a few thousand pounds to spare Eizo make some very nice monitors whose colour gamut covers most of the AdobeRGB colour space.

Quality Monitors

There are plenty of these, I would recommend looking at the PCPro A-List. If you are using Photoshop Lightroom a wide screen is a good move and the current recommendations are the Samsung SyncMaster 2232BW which is a 20in widescreen or if you want something big the 24" Samsung SyncMaster 245B (I have one of those).

If you are buying from Dell their widescreen monitors are pretty good. I use their 17" Ultrasharp monitors for my day job and they are very good.

Monitor Calibration Equipment

Now that X-Rite have bought Gretag Macbeth and Pantone there is only one supplier of colour calibration equipment. Here is a list of possibilities:

• Panone Huey - Cheap and pretty good. Uses the same measuring device as the Eye One Display but with dumbed down software. It does do the right thing for photography.
• Pantone Huey Pro - The same hardware as the Huey but it uses more colour patches to give a more accurate profile. The Huey can be upgraded to a Huey Pro.
• Eye One Display LT - Falls in between the Huey and the Eye One Display 2.
• Eye One Display 2 - The best of the Gretag Macbeth range of monitor calibrators. If you have a scanner you can calibrate that and then create printer profiles by scanning a printed test chart. I doubt that the profiles would be of the same quality as a custom profile made using an Eye One Photo.