Twin City Camera Club | Tip & Techniques page 3

TIPS & TECHNIQUES

Tips & Techniques page 3.

The place for "show and tell," to learn "how to," find ideas and maybe a secret or two...

Everything has been thought of before. The hard thing is to think of it again...

Test images used to Calibrate Monitors

The test images on this page all play a roll in calibrating monitors. If you do a search of "How to Calibrate Monitors" with Google or Yahoo you will get thousands of results. If you have the knowledge and/or feel comfortable trying to adjust your monitor then you'll have plenty of websites to choose from to get advice. The test images here come from a lot of those websites and from commercial printing labs. They are presented here to give you a visual opportunity to see some of these test patterns without searching all over the internet. We aren't providing instructions on how to adjust your monitor, just the test images to give you some idea what they are like.

●●●

Monitor Black Point Check

The above image is based on a test developed by Bruce Fraser and detailed in his book Real World Color Management. The primary goals are to determine if the monitor black point is set correctly and find the minimum shadow level your monitor can display. This test works best if your browser window is set to full screen mode, as that minimizes the amount of pure white showing. That is also why the text and links on this page are subdued grays. The next page in this series has an image to help evaluate you monitor's grayscale sensitivity across the full tonal range.

The animated gif ramps the monitor output up in steps of 1 RGB unit. The starting point is pure black: RGB = (0, 0, 0). The first step highlights the central square. Each following step increases the output level by one unit. A top quality monitor using an excellent calibration system can show the difference between levels 0 and 1. Average monitors will not show any increase in output until level 5 to 8.

For more information about this test and other tests go to: http://www.drycreekphoto.com

●●●

White Point Calibration

You should be able to distinguish between the 95% and 100% patches in the above grayscale. If they appear to be the same, then contrast is too high, and highlights are blocked. Most monitors work fine with contrast set at 100%.

Black Point Calibration

You should be able to distinguish between the patches marked 0 and 10 in the above grayscale. Patch 0 should be perfectly black, matching the unscanned portion of your monitor, and patch 10 should be barely visible.

●●●

MacbethCC-aRGB-L.jpg: Values in Adobe RGB (1998) color space, with labels.

Read Me File

For more information about this test and other tests go to: http://www.drycreekphoto.com

●●●

You should be able to see 21 distinct zones in the image below, from pure white to pure black.

●●●

Additional Tips & Techniques pages:

- IMAGINATION by Jim Pittman

- IDEAS – AND HOW THEY WERE DONE by Jim Pittman

- Test images used to Calibrate Monitors - You are Here

- TCCC Wildflower Fieldtrip Guides

- Surrealistic Image Enhancement with Elements 6.0

- Do It Yourself Flash Projects by Ted Post

© Copyright Notice: We respect the intellectual property of others, and we ask visitors and users of our website to do the same. In accordance with the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) and other applicable law, all articles and photographic images presented on the Twin City Camera Club website are the copyrighted © works of the individual authors and/or photographers and protected by US and International copyright laws and cannot be used, copied, edited, downloaded, transferred, altered, reproduced in any way or transmitted in any form in any medium without the express written permission of the individual copyright holder. The contents of this website are © Copyright 2003-2012 Twin City Camera Club. All Rights Reserved.