Post-Production Pro Tips: Calibrate Your Monitors

We’ve mentioned this before, but it’s so important that it bears repeating every so often.  Monitor calibration is absolutely necessary for color-correction work whether you outsource the work to PWD or do it yourself.

When outsourcing color-correction, the only way to ensure you see the same thing that your editor does is for you to both have calibrated monitors.  If you look at the editor’s finished work on an uncalibrated monitor, there’s no telling what the images will look like.

Say you then instruct the editor to readjust the images because they don’t look right on your monitor.  When the images come back a second time, they may look better to you, but they’re actually now skewed.  When you send them to a printer, they won’t come back like you expect.

If you do your own correction, you may think calibration is unnecessary because none of your clients calibrate.  While it’s true that the majority of consumers don’t even know what calibration is, it’s still in your best interest to give them as correct a file as possible because you don’t know just how skewed their monitors will be.  And if there’s any chance that the images will be sent to print, you’ll definitely want to make sure you got the color right to begin with.