Screen calibration.
Admittedly, it isn't sexy, but if you edit photographs then
you definitely need to get this right.
So in this video, we'll go through the how, why and what
so you can be 100% sure that what you see
is what you get.
Okay so I'm going to be going through this using a BenQ display
and the new BenQ software called Palette Master Ultimate, which is completely free
for BenQ user but all the settings I go through will be relevant for you
no matter what display or calibration device and software you're using.
I also spoke with Dr.
Chris Bai from BenQ and asked him some questions about calibration
so that you don't just get to know how to do this correctly,
but understand what you're doing and why.
Right. Let's dive in.
Now I will be doing some other videos on Palette Master Ultimate
because it does way more than what I'm going to cover in this video,
but when I first open up the new Palette Master Ultimate,
I need to tell it which display I'm calibrating
Then we choose the calibration device we're using,
which I have already connected before I started the software.
So I choose it from the ones listed and then give it a moment
to be recognized, and once it is, we then see that it is shown as connected.
We then have three activity choices to choose from color calibration,
which is what we'll be doing and then there's advance color adjust,
which is big news if you are a BenQ user,
so I'm going to cover that in another and then there's validation.
So I'll choose color calibration and click on Start.
On this next screen, we have this calibration target menu,
and by default, it's set to a photography and these are the default
settings for brightness, color space, white point, black point
and so on., and these are what the display will be calibrated to.
There's other choices in here too, depending
on what you're going to be doing, so you just choose the most suitable one.
Now I'm sticking with photography but I do want to change some of the settings
because as they are, they don't give the best results for my room and the lighting.
So I'll click on Edit Target
and now I can dial in what I know is best for me.
First of all, we have luminance, and this is without doubt
the most important setting because this, when it set wrong,
is definitely what's going to give you, if you do lots of printing, is prints
that come out way too dark.
You'll often hear it recommended to set luminance between 80 and 120 Candela.
But this never worked for me.
Prints were always too dark.
So after lots of testing and lots of money wasted on ink and paper, I discovered
that for my room, a luminance of 60 candela gives the best results.
So I open the menu, go to custom and just type in 60.
Next, we have the white point.
In other words, what color temperature do you want your display set to?
The default is d65, which is basically 6500 Kelvin.
And this is the value that most mobile
phones, tablets and smart televisions are set to these days.
D65 is considered industry standard for daylight,
and this came about a few years ago in London, when a group of people took
measurements at midday in Greenwich for five consecutive days
and the average temperature reading that they got was something like 6506.
So it was decided that daylight temperature would be 6500 Kelvin,
which is D65.
Now that's great for general day to day editing images,
sharing them online, sending to others and so on.
But if you like to print your images, then to get a better screen to print match,
which is definitely the goal, a value of around 5000 Kelvin works best.
So I'm going to choose D50.
Next we have gamut or the color space you want to calibrate your display to.
And for this I'm going to go with Adobe RGB Next, we have Gamma.
And this relates to the displays pixels, luminance value
at every brightness level from 0 to 100%.
A lower gamma makes shadows look brighter and can result in a flatter,
washed out image where it's harder to see brighter highlights.
Higher gamma can make it harder to see detail in shadows.
The recommended value to use is 2.2, but if you are calibrating
to get a better screen to print match, then use L*.
And at the end of the video, one of the questions answered by Dr.
Chris Bai is why you would go for L* and what exactly is it?
But for general day to day use, the best option to go for is 2.2
Now in Palette Master Ultimate, we have this checkbox for enhanced
gamma calibration, which if we go for it,
does make the calibration process take a little bit longer.
Now this is really only relevant if you work on a lot of black and white
images.
So if that's not the case, don't bother checking the checkbox.
Now, I do quite a bit of black and white images, so I will tick the checkbox.
Finally, we have the black point,
and if you're looking for your display to look its best for day to day browsing,
editing, watching movies, gaming and so on, then go with absolute zero,
which will ensure great contrast with deep blacks.
However, if you do a lot of printing, then you're not going to want that
because the blacks you see on the display will be too black.
They'll contain no detail, and color can be affected in those dark areas.
This is why it's recommended to go for a black point
value of 0.5.
Once you have your settings dialed in, as can be done here in Palette Master
Ultimate, most software will allow you to save those settings
so that you can use them again later without having to manually dial
in settings each and every time.
Then on the next screen we see a confirmation of the settings
we've dialed in.
So we have luminance of 60 Candela,
A white point of D50 for a better screen
to print match for everything else I would use D65.
The gamut or color space is adobe RGB.
A gamma of L*.
again, for a better screen to print match.
Otherwise it would be 2.2 And Black
Point is set to 0.5 Candela because again, this is for printing.
Otherwise it will be absolute zero for the best contrast and the deepest blacks.
This bit at the bottom here is where you can choose
which of the three available slots you want them to be stored in.
So calibration one, two or three, and those correspond
to the one, two and three on the hoy key puck.
So click on next, and this I really like
because it gives you a few things to check before going ahead with the calibration.
Firstly, making sure your display has been on
for at least 30 minutes before doing a calibration
to give time for the workings of the display to warm up and settle down.
Secondly, use a Displayport cable
or Usb-c cable to connect your display to your computer.
Now you can use HDMI if you're able to and you know how to dive into the graphics
card settings to make sure that they are set to full range and not limited range.
But if you don't know how to, you're not able to
or maybe even you're a mac user where you can't change that then
Displayport cable or Usb-c cable is the best option
to go for to get the full range of colors from 0 to 255.
However, there is also a way we can check to see if we're getting full range,
and I'll show you that in a minute.
Also, turn off the screen saver and any energy saving settings.
And if you're using two displays, don't be using mirroring mode.
Then we have the ICC version and this relates to the color management module.
That's not hardware, it's software and refers to such things
as Photoshop, Lightroom, Capture one and so on.
if you're using fairly recent software that's maybe five years old ish
or something like that, then go for the latest version, Version 4.
But if you're using old software, go for Version 2.
This profile name here gives a summary of the settings we've applied,
but that's it.
We're pretty much good to go. So I'll click on next.
We're then told to remove the cover on the calibration device.
Once that's done, click next and then position the calibration device
on the display surface, making sure to angle it back
so that the device sits on it with a good seal rather
than just hanging there and then click start.
This, now is when you see the display going brighter and darker
and flashing all different colors up as the calibration device
takes readings of the values to then create an ICC profile
that sets your display to the correct values of brightness and color.
Now, the thing I love about Palette Master Ultimate, is that without manually
having to do it, the software also does a validation as part of the process.
And this is something that so many people don't do but
is massively important because it tells us how good the calibration was.
and how our display is performing.
So now it's finished.
Let's take a look So we can see here I wanted a luminance of 60
and we got that.
I went for the D50 white point and we got a value of 5017.
So yeah, that's pretty damn close.
The black point I went for 0.5 Candela
and the calibration was able to achieve 0.6.
So again very close, very happy with that.
This here though is the best bit.
The Delta E result.
This tells us how well our display is performing
and also the quality of the calibration.
Anything below 5 is considered very good
and anything below 2 is considered excellent.
And you can see here the average achieved in the calibration Is 0.6.
That is amazing and the maximum was 1.26.
So yeah, very happy with that.
Now it's a good idea to actually save these are validation reports
because it allows you
then to look back over time to see if they're changing at all,
which will give you an indication of how your display is performing.
You can do that here by simply clicking on save report.
You can give it a name and then it’s saved as a PDF.
Alright, so that is my display, perfectly calibrated
and all of the settings you see me use there for the luminance, color space,
gamma, gamut, black point and ICC profile version are completely compatible
with other software if you're not using BenQ.
And like I said, I have two calibrations, one
for everyday use and one specifically for a better screen
to print match that I can dive between using the hotkey puk.
Okay so at the start of this video, I mentioned that I'd had a chat with Dr.
Chris Bai from BenQ asking him specific things about calibration,
and I want to share some of that with you now because we've gone through
how to calibrate the device, but this now is going to give you
some knowledge and understanding as to why we use the settings that we do.
All right.
Okay.
So we've got a first one when calibrating your screen
with Palette Master Ultimate, Element, or any calibration software.
What White point setting
would you recommend for a better screen to print match?
Okay, so
basically or this is really depend on scenarios.
So the scenario you're actually talking about is the screen to print match.
So this case, the best white point you want to choose
is really depends on the illuminant you're looking at your print.
So what this means is actually
where your paper,
your print is put under like is this that a D50 illuminate
or is this like a halogen illuminate or is this like D65 lumeninent?
And then so this really like
depends on what kind of color of the light you're looking at.
Is it like yellowish
like or is like bluish light or is it like a neutral light?
Okay.
So I think people are really getting confused about this.
So so that's why the graphics industry,
they have a standard, they call it D50.
It's like daylight 5000K.
the graphics art, they use that as a standard.
So this is standard, which actually is a mixture
of the daylight like a 6500 K and the indoor
like the yellowish light, where we use the in the household.
But this is a mixture of this indoor and outdoor light together.
So it's averaged out as a 5000 K Okay.
Right.
So if you don't know what kind of illumination you're looking at,
I would say you can go for like this.
D50 setting that was the best bet, but
if you're really picky about your print and your the match,
then the best way is to measure the illumination.
Actually, the illumination, I actually I would say
the color temperature reflective from your paper.
Okay.
The reason why is because your paper is not maybe it's not pure white,
maybe sometime is tinted a little bit yellowish or a little bit bluish.
So the best way is looking at it.
Try to measure it from the paper under illumination and measure
that reflected flat reflected light
so you can get the paper white as
the calibration white
or the monitor But for somebody who doesn't have the ability to do that
for a general then go for D50.
Perfect.
That's pretty 50. Yes. Okay.
Next question.
When we last spoke, you mentioned about using L* for the gamma, Right.
Could you explain why that is?
And if people don't have a L* setting, would you suggest maybe using 2.2?
Right.
The reason why L*
is still under a scenario of matching the prints from screen.
Okay.
And Gamma 2.2 is good for if you don't do
the, is good for general use.
For example, if you're looking at the screen alone, right?
Gamma 2.2 is a perfect choice of doing that.
Okay.
But if you're really picky about this matching screen to print,
L* gives you the best visual ability
of matching the
screen to print.
The reason why is because the L* is based
on the visual response from the human
visual system.
Because L* actually gives us the
the we look at this grayscale L* It gives you like
equal steps in the grayscale visually.
It's not measurement is visually gives you the
so if you like, individual
equal steps of differences
that that gives us the best grayscale reproduction
from L*
So that's what I recommend that if you want to capture good
response like a good match from screen to match screen
to print that L* curve will get the best.
But if you don't have that in your calibration software, then
Gamma 2.2 is still a good way to go.
Now, the last thing I want to mention is about the HDMI and how you can check
whether to see
if you have full range or limited range without diving into the graphics card.
Basically, once you've done a calibration, as you can see
here, I've done on this new SW272U from BenQ.
When we check the validation report if the average delta E
is less than one, we have full range.
Okay, so that's all I have for this video.
So if you got something from it, I'd really appreciate a thumbs up.
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But for now, that's me. I'm done.
I'll catch you in the next video.