From the course: Video Gear

Calibrating displays on a PC

From the course: Video Gear

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Calibrating displays on a PC

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- Now Rich, I'm about to make the cardinal mistake in calibration. - Right. - Any of my calibrator friends who are watching this, please, please forgive me. - Don't judge him, I'm making him do this, I said, "Rob, you know, I agree that having a dedicated piece of hardware is awesome, but shouldn't we show the nice folks at home how to at least make their monitors a little bit better with the built-in tools on the operating system. - And this is the same thing that comes in, that we'll talk about in a future episode, with video monitors using things like color bars, and blue-only modes, my personal opinion about that is that all of these methods are flawed and not repeatable because your eyes and your brain constantly lie to you, things like, technical, - Did you get a good night's sleep last night? - Right. - That affects it. - Things like your environment, and sort of technical terms, it's called adaptation, what's around you, the colors and all sorts of things, So, I just want to put a gigantic caveat on this, this is not my preferred way, but both on the Mac and PC side of things, we do have ways of obviously manipulating what's going on screen, just keep in mind that it's not perfect. So let's start here on the PC, Rich. I'm on Windows 8, and Windows 8's actually gotten pretty good with it's color management stuff. On this HP laptop that I have, or workstation I should say, I actually have an NVidia card and there's a couple different ways I can adjust my screen and what's going on here. First thing I'm gonna do is simply come over and show my settings here, and every single computer, is going to have a brightness control. Now, I think a lot of people are tempted to just go, Brightness, up, up up, up, up. So it's the surface of the sun. In fact when you look at different manufacturers out there, they often say, "Hey, our monitors can do a thousand NITs," that's a measurement of brightness. There's no surefire way to ruin your eyes and ruin the creative work that you're doing by having something too, too bright, so you want to get something comfortable, for your eyes, and for the environment that you're in. - You also have to be aware that if you're running off of say, the internal battery, sometimes the monitor dims itself, and you might not have noticed. - Totally. Now, the thing about this is that this is just sort of a preference, a comfort level. There's no science behind this, yet, we'll get to that. But I say, if you're in a dark environment, bring that monitor brightness down. If you're in a really bright environment, outside, or you have a lot of ambient light in your room, bring that up. You want to get it to a comfortable level, and try to get that repeatable, between different places. So that's sort of the base-line thing we can do on a monitor. Now the other thing I can do, here, on Windows, because I have again, an NVidia graphics card, I could come over to my NVidia control panel here, and in my NVidia control panel down here, I have a whole bunch of options for adjusting color and contrast in the image. Now by default, saying using the video playing setting, which is kind of like, my sort of OS-level thing. Lemme make sure I'm on the laptop display here. But I can adjust contrast and brightness, right, sort of black level, and white level. I can adjust overall hue and saturation so this is gonna kinda be like tinting, and sort of the intensity of the colors. Again, because you're not using hardware, you're doing this by eyes, this is kind of a preference. What I would suggest that you do, if you're doing this manual kind of way, bring up an image in PhotoShop, or even a desktop background, that you know really, really, really, really, really well. And that you can, as you're adjusting some of these settings, know that hey, this is what I need and the way I'm going for. We also have gamma settings where we can kinda control the non-linear response of light going on, on the display. And then over here, on the advanced tab, this is where we can control things, our dynamic range, whether we want a limited range, sort of traditional video range, or we can go into a full range, full RGB. That's really gonna depend on your workflow. Now, Rich, there is one more way, in turning around the PC here that I'm gonna show you, to sort of manually calibrate. And that's if you come up to do a search. I'm just gonna go, Calibrate, Display Color. And I can bring up this built-in, on the OS level, Display Calibration tool. And as we'll see in just a moment, this is kind of similar to what you can do on the Mac side of things. And it's giving me, "Hey, this is gonna help you get set up," some warning messages here. I'll just go ahead and click the Next button. And what you can see is that it's saying, "Go ahead and adjust your display, until things start looking right." And you can see, I can come in here, little slider, I'm adjusting sort of a native response, - So if we push it too far, we start to get dark circles in the middle, and if we go the other way, you get white circles, - Right, and so we're, - So lemme guess, no circles. - Right we're trying to hit the sweet spot here. And this is again, if you've ever used, I know I've used the Mac version of this a lot, - It says squint. - Yeah, it's the exact same kind of idea, we're using our eyes. So then I can say, "Hey, do I want to adjust the "brightness and contrast controls," or I can split that, You can see, as I go through this, it's basically just using your eyes, there's not rocket science here, as I adjust the control for my brightness, and my contrast on the display, to see whether I lose the X, whether the white blooms out, - And you would be using the physical buttons on your computer here, or which ones would you be controlling? - Well it depends on my display, right? Because this is just a generic Windows sort of thing. If my display and my monitor actually had brightness and contrast buttons on it, I'd probably be using those. In this case, with this laptop, I'd have to minimize this window a little bit, come back out probably to my NVidia control panel, and start adjusting over here, on the color side of things, adjusting my brightness and contrast to get that done. The point is, is after you step through all these steps, and let's just say, that they're all correct for now. As I go through that, again, now we're doing colors, red, green, and blue. - So now, it's giving us the option to say, well, show me what it looked like before, what does it look like now? - Exactly, and you can do the same thing on the Mac. You can compare your previous calibration to your current calibration, see how they line up. Simply click, Finish up here, and what will happen is you can actually go ahead and just name this, it's now a profile on the monitor that you can use, again all manual. So, that's a couple different ways to manually calibrate on the Windows side. Either using basic brightness control, using some of the built-in settings that your graphics card may have, or using this built-in OS side. Now, I'm curious about how this works, I know how it works a little bit, but I know you're more on the Mac these days, and I'm more on the PC. Let's dive in next and take a look at manually calibrating a Mac display.

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