PullingWords

Up until recently I poo-poo'd the whole idea of monitor calibration mainly due to my ignorance on the subject. I didn't really undertstand the point of it all. I mean, if my images looked fine on my monitor then surely they must look OK on everyone elses, right? My whole arrogant viewpoint took a 180 when I recently had the displeasure of viewing PushingPrimitives.com on a properly calibrated LCD. All my images appeared way too bright resulting in washed out reds and blues, garrish greens and muddy blacks. I imediately vowed to resolve the situation by first calibrating my monitors at home using the built in configuration wizard in OSX for my Mac and the excellent freeware tool Monitor Calibration Wizard for Windows.

Now I was properly configured but still had the problem of my entire back catalogue of images being completely fucked up. So, I set about loading each image into Photoshop, adjusting the gamma using the levels tool, saving (obviously) then uploading to the server. Needless to say, this was a laborious process taking me the best part of a morning to complete but the results were worth it, in my eyes anyway.

I'm not going to preach and command you all to go forth and calibrate, after all I lived in blissful uncalibrated ignorance for over 12 years but I will say it is something thats worth investigating if you do a lot of imageing for the web.