How-To’s Day: Color Management: Calibrating Monitors In Windows

Mac-based designers have color management, at least at the monitor level, built into their operating systems. ColorSync is right there in Control Panels. Windows do not. Or, more accurately, Windows has color management built in (Microsoft ICM), but there is no user interface for Windows-based designers to calibrate their monitors. ICM only enables choosing of pre-created ICC or ICM profiles, which are of no use for color management since every monitor—even among the same models from the same manufacturer—differ.

To compensate for Microsoft’s short-sighted deficiency with color management in the operating system, all major Adobe products have for years installed Adobe Gamma, a basic monitor calibration utility. If you own virtually any version of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, or even now defunct Adobe products like ImageReady, you likely have Adobe Gamma sitting in your Windows Control Panel.

Adobe Gamma, like the Macintosh ColorSync, is only a basic (i.e. not professional or reliable) monitor calibration applet. Ideally one wants a professional grade calibration utility built specifically for that purpose, one that removes the imprecise and variable human eye as the color profiling tool and replaces it with a spectrometer, a light measuring device. If that is not a current option, at least use what you have to get a reasonable approximation of color on a monitor.

Posted to the Toss the Box forums by Jay is a walkthrough of the Adobe Gamma monitor calibration wizard.

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TAGS:  design howto quark indesign adobe graphics  

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