Calibrating Your Monitor - Adobe PHOTOSHOP ELEMENTS Manual

CHAPTER 3
66
Working with Color
• Full color management to tag the image with
a standard color profile for print graphics. The
exact color profile depends on the color mode of
the image.
3 Choose File > Save As, and select ICC Profile
(Windows) or Embed Color Profile (Mac OS) in
the Save As dialog box.
4 Finish saving the image, as described in "Saving
images" on page 246.

Calibrating your monitor

For color management to work effectively, you
must calibrate your computer monitor. The Adobe
Gamma utility, which is automatically installed
into your Control Panels folder, lets you calibrate
and characterize your monitor to a standard and
then save the settings as an ICC-compliant profile.
This calibration helps you eliminate any color cast
in your monitor, make your monitor grays as
neutral as possible, and standardize image display
across different monitors.
Monitor color performance changes and
degrades over time; recharacterize your
monitor every month or so. If you find it difficult or
impossible to calibrate your monitor to a standard, it
may be too old and faded.
Monitor calibration involves adjusting video
settings, which may be unfamiliar to you.
A monitor profile uses these settings to precisely
describe how your monitor reproduces color.
The overall level and
Brightness and contrast
range, respectively, of display intensity. These
parameters work just as they do on a television set.
Adobe Gamma helps you set an optimum
brightness and contrast range for calibration.
The brightness of the midtone values.
Gamma
The values produced by a monitor from black to
white are nonlinear—if you graph the values, they
form a curve, not a straight line. The gamma value
defines the slope of that curve halfway between
black and white. Gamma adjustment compensates
for the nonlinear tonal reproduction of output
devices such as monitor tubes.
The substance that monitors use to
Phosphors
emit light. Different phosphors have different
color characteristics.
The coordinates (measured in the
White point
CIE XYZ color space) at which red, green, and blue
phosphors at full intensity create white.
To calibrate your monitor using Adobe Gamma:
Do the following before you start the
1
calibration process:
Make sure your monitor has been turned on for
•
at least a half hour. This gives it sufficient time to
warm up for a more accurate color reading.
Make sure your monitor is displaying thousands
•
(16 bits) of colors or more.