Back in the early days of the PC, a color screen was a luxury for the “rich” with a whopping 320 by 200 resolution (about the same as most current cell phones) and all of 16 different colors. They were expensive, often more than $1,000.
If you got a color monitor you were happy to see anything close to red, blue and/or green, much less shades. But that didn’t matter since almost all applications were text based. A phrase at the time was WYSIWYG, what you see is what you get, but only in text. A graphics program would let you paint in those 16 colors with the ease of using an etch-a-sketch. But that didn’t really matter; there weren’t any affordable color printers.
Jump forward 20 years. Monitors display at 1280 x 1024 resolution with over 16 million color shades and sell for about $100. Everyone is running a GUI (graphical user interface, a.k.a. Windows). And photo quality ink jet printers are “free” after rebates.
90% of all cameras sold this year were digital. More and more people are downloading their pictures onto their computers and using software like Photoshop or Paintshop Pro to retouch those pictures.
But when you hit print, what you see is not what you get. Colors that looked good on screen don’t print the same way. It’s now important that your monitor colors be better than a close approximation.
There are low cost solutions…
One is Huey, from Pantone. Pantone is known for being the experts at color matching. Almost every print job uses Pantone color matched ink. Huey is about the size of a small cigar and plugs into a USB port, where it gets its power. Install the Huey software and it color calibrates your monitor and adjusts it to the lighting conditions of your room. Leave it plugged in its stand and it re-adjusts the monitor as the lighting changes. I noticed immediately after installing Huey that my monitor had been displaying everything much too bluish (e.g. too cool), that made my prints come out too red (actually more like brown) when what I printed what looked good on screen.
The calibration process is automatic. First Huey measures the ambient room light (intensity and color). Then you place Huey on your monitor/LCD screen. The Huey software puts up shades of grey and various colors and measures what the display shows. From that it can calculate the monitor’s profile and make its adjustments. The last step shows the difference between the uncorrected and corrected, which my monitor showed was displaying too much blue.
Once calibrated you put Huey in its holder and it can automatically adjust your monitor for the ambient light (e.g. if you have windows and the sun shines in some parts of the day). It will also remind you every month or so to recalibrate your monitor.
