Calibrate Your Monitor like a PRO: Step-by-Step guide | Match colors to your laptop, tablet or phone

unless you have a pro great expensive monitor chances are that the display you're looking at is showing colors in a wrong way that may not be a problem for light office use emails uh spreadsheets all that and when you have just one monitor but if you're like me and bought a monitor to use as an external display for your laptop or have a dual or maybe even triple monitor setup you probably want to match them all to show colors in the same way and if you do some photo or video editing or Graphics design maybe you need those colors to be as accurate as possible hi my name is Nick and in today's video we'll go through calibrating your monitor and matching each colors to your laptop tablet or whatever else you're using as a secondary display oh and you won't need a special expensive calibration tool for that calibration will require three things your monitor another monitor or smartphone or tablet for reference and your eyes as for the monitor you will be calibrating the better srgb coverage it has the better the result you'll get by the way as RGB coverage means how many colors in standard red green and blue color space your monitor can show you can find that value for your monitor at manufacturer's website or at display specifications.com don't worry if you have a crappy budget office panel yes in this case you won't get Vivid and really accurate colors but you will still be able to get your image much closer to the one on your reference device if you happen to have a relatively modern MacBook with Retina screen or a recent iPhone or iPad they are all perfect devices for reference even if you have an older device like iPhone 5S or iPad Mini 4 they actually perform pretty damn well in terms of color reproduction as for Android devices well it depends I suggest checking out notebookcheck.net they make extensive display tests and even recommend optimal display settings scroll down to display section here right under the green flickering information you'll generally see if your device has a color accurate screen and if you need to make some adjustments for the best result first we'll need to make sure that both our Monitor and reference display are not affected by all kind of fancy settings like automatic brightness night mode reading mode eye Comfort mode true tone and so on head should settings display and turn all that off some monitors have also some of this built in so check monitor settings menu as well in terms of test materials for color matching I would recommend against using just plain white color checkerboards or videos I recommend using aesthetic image as it will be much easier to compare and you won't need to mess around with starting a playback on both devices at the same time it's best to use image with enough white or a light gray so it's easier to adjust white balance and some dark zones so it's easier to adjust contrast I prefer to use my actual Mac background with some basic apps open or a screenshot of that just make sure there is no HDR content on screen as it may affect the calibration I would recommend putting both monitors either side by side or if one is smaller than the other place the smaller one closer to you right in front of the bigger monitor so they appear roughly the same size this will greatly simplify the next steps now we need to set the brightness to the highest possible value that is achievable on both monitors so for example your monitor can go up to 250 nits and your laptop can go up to 500. in that case set the monitor to 100 brightness and then lower the brightness on your laptop until they are even with the monitor navigate to your monitor settings cycle through all the modes and select the one that looks closer to your reference it doesn't have to be perfect right now how many modes you'll have and what are their names greatly depends on your monitor here with Samsung M8 smart monitor I have just two modes available graphic and entertainment two more modes can be activated with some manipulations and I talk more about that in my review but I ended up for using Graphics mode anyway if your monitor has srgb or DCI P3 modes it's worth checking that out as turning them on might give you ideal results right away set color saturation to medium value and set contrast levels to 50 or higher for now disable contrast enhances or any other enhancers if you have that on your monitor we'll return to saturation and contrast a bit later okay here we will come to the high hardest part white balance if you have a separate color tone setting on your monitor like I have with my Samsung M8 set it to something like neutral or natural as you don't want it to be too cool or too warm now it's time to open up white balance controls you may have three sliders or six sliders like I have here basically you are adjusting three primary colors red green and blue that white is composed of if you see six sliders here again in just colors in the brighter areas and offset effects colors in the dark ones start with adjusting bright areas or gain first it's important not to do some extreme changes as this will affect color reproduction quality greatly that's why we tried to make our monitor look neutral and already closer to the reference even before adjusting white balance the general rule here is trying to achieve the results that we want which is why it's similar to the reference ones by chikuni only two out of three colors available and most of the times you should only lower values down go up only if absolutely necessary for my Samsung M8 I had to raise blue gain to plus 12 and blue offset to plus 5 as in all other cases I got a bit of green or magenta teams the offset controls are typically more sensitive requiring less change than the game controls to achieve a desired effect you may find that the original white balance at high price areas has drifted after you've adjusted low brightness areas repeat the high brightness gain adjustment and low brightness offset adjustment until you are satisfied with the result at this point it's best to take a shot break look into the window or go outside so let your eyes relax trust me this way when you come back to the monitor it will be much easier to make that final tunes of white balance and it's time to adjust saturation and check if we've set white balance right to do this I prefer to Google color checkerboard and open x-rite color Checker image in a new tab of my browser I lowest color saturation down and start increasing it until they look as Vivid as on the reference screen if you see that there's some magenta green or scientine return the previous step and adjust white balance once more if your colors don't become saturated enough there's one more setting you can tweak return to contrast setting and adjust levels to match contrast on the reference screen some monitors like the one I have here allow for additional contrast enhancement and Shadow detail adjustment if you have those it makes sense to play around with values to fine-tune contrast parameters there are many different contrast tests online and I'll leave a link to my favorite one in the description down below you can use use that to see if everything is okay ideally you should see all the bars and difference between each of them should be visible at this point you should already have a noticeable result by the way hit that like button if you are getting value from this video and there is one more thing to check out in gamma the gamma defines how the amount of light on screen depends on 8-bit red green and blue values if that didn't make a lot of sense to you no worries 2.2 that's gamma value you're looking forward to and it's industry standard I'll leave a link to a special test to further calibrate gamma in the description down below and if you use that make sure you have your monitor set to its native resolution and you are using no scaling in browser as well for that test you will have to take some steps back from a monitor or squint your eyes and honestly it's part from convenient so I suggest a much easier way as we have our brightness white balance color saturation and contrast set to match the reference monitor open the image with white and some dark gray contents and now cycled through different gamma options on your monitor to match the reference here are the parameters I ended up with and that's it let's see how my monitor looked before and after the calibration I'll leave all the settings I used on my Samsung M8 monitor in the description to this video so if you happen to have the same monitor as I do you can use those hopefully it will speed up your calibration process thank you for watching this video up until then and if it was helpful hit that like button and consider subscribing to the channel see you in the next videos foreign

Channel: Nick Borodenko

Views: 35,095

Keywords: match display color with macbook, color match multiple monitors, the easies way to calibrate monitor, best way to calibrate monitor, best way to calibrate monitor color, how to calibrate monitor to match macbook pro, monitor calibration with smartphone, calibrate external display, how to calibrate color on monitor mac, monitor calibration, calibrate external display mac, how to calibrate a display without a colorimeter, how to calibrate color on monitor, samsung m8 calibrate

Id: dD85bd0uiuE

Length: 10min 17sec (617 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 05 2023