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Calibrate and profile your monitor

When you calibrate your monitor, you are adjusting it so it conforms to a known specification. Once your monitor is calibrated, the profiling utility lets you save a color profile. The profile describes the color behavior of the monitor—what colors can or cannot be displayed on the monitor and how the numeric color values in an image must be converted so that colors are displayed accurately.

  1. Make sure your monitor has been turned on for at least a half hour. This gives it sufficient time to warm up and produce more consistent output.
  2. Make sure your monitor is displaying thousands of colors or more. Ideally, make sure it is displaying millions of colors or 24‑bit or higher.
  3. Remove colorful background patterns on your monitor desktop and set your desktop to display neutral grays. Busy patterns or bright colors surrounding a document interfere with accurate color perception.
  4. Do one of the following to calibrate and profile your monitor:

    • In Windows, install and use a monitor calibration utility.

    • In Mac OS, use the Calibrate utility, located on the System Preferences/Displays/Color tab.

    • For the best results, use third-party software and measuring devices. In general, using a measuring device such as a colorimeter along with software can create more accurate profiles because an instrument can measure the colors displayed on a monitor far more accurately than the human eye.

    Note: Monitor performance changes and declines over time; recalibrate and profile 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.

Most profiling software automatically assigns the new profile as the default monitor profile. For instructions on how to manually assign the monitor profile, refer to the Help system for your operating system.