Can You Calibrate a Monitor WITHOUT a Colorimeter?

spending about 200 bucks on a fancy calorimeter that you probably only use once doesn't sound very appealing right so can we actually calibrate our monitors without such a tool basically by using only our eyes and a smartphone can we really make monitor more color accurate that way or will we actually make things worse well i happen to have a pair of eyes and i have a calorimeter on hand to verify what we're doing so i guess we're gonna find out [Music] now there are tons of websites that claim to have just the perfect test pictures patterns and whatnot to calibrate a monitor bar eye to be honest though a lot of these tests are either pretty useless poorly made or very very situational two of my favorite websites for test pictures are the iso monitor test and lagom we won't need every single test from these two sides but they generally provide good quality and useful test pictures now for a clean start i already did a full reset of the monitor i also checked that those weird image enhancement features are actually turned off and i chose the most customizable mode now at first glance the screen seems to be a bit too green and to blue last of which is a very common problem so let's check if we can improve the color temperature first now for that we want to use a neutral gray or white test picture we're gonna just misuse the defective pixels and uniformity test from the iso monitor test for that with a white test picture we now want to go into the monitors menu and adjust the color temperature or rgb sliders i could now try and just completely eyeball it but honestly without any reference this actually is pretty difficult especially if you're not used to seeing calibrated screens every day so a popular trick to make this a bit easier is using a few sheets of white paper as a reference it's important though that we don't have the monitor shining on the pieces of paper what would make all of this pretty useless instead we wanted to reflect the ambient light which hopefully is close to the daylight's color temperature and tint so i'm gonna hold it a bit like this and adjust the rgb settings to make the white of the monitor match the white of the paper [Music] now as you might have noticed i'm only turning the values down and never go above the default starting value even though it's possible on some monitors you should almost never turn them higher than the default value which is 50 in case of this monitor also try to adjust only two of these three sliders and try to let the other one stay in its default position this will keep you from making overly extreme adjustments and also keep you from reducing the contrast of your monitor too much generally you want to avoid any extreme adjustments here if you need more than a 10 percent adjustment you're likely doing something wrong and as you probably can see that's exactly the case here the white of the paper looks very different from the white of the monitor and i need to make massive adjustments to get the monitor even remotely close to what the paper looks like so what am i doing wrong here well the problem is that i'm using artificial lights instead of sunlight i have my studio lights on for recording this video and they have a vastly different color temperature than our average daylight and that's actually true for most household lights as well our goal though is to meet the so-called d65 white point which basically is the standard white point for monitor calibration these days and was created to best represent average daylight so as you might have guessed this paper trick won't work well if you're using artificial light instead of sunlight you probably will end up making massive adjustments and getting a pretty different white point in that case so i'm gonna turn off my video lights for a moment let some sunlight in and do those adjustments again [Music] so the adjustments are done but i'm actually not very confident that i did a good job here so let's take measurement and actually see [Music] so out of the box the monitor had a delta e of about 5.0 in comparison to the d65y point so this is what we gotta beat so let's see [Music] so did this paper trick work well it actually worked way better than i thought it would we did not only improve the white point by a huge margin but also got extremely close to what we can achieve with real calibration i honestly did not expect it to work that well i mean there is some potential for errors but generally i'm impressed of how well this worked out so let's tackle the gamma curve next one thing to keep in mind though is that the color temperature and gamma are only part of what makes a monitor color accurate a real calibration and profiling can do much more than that but yeah let's see how far we can get without that now i'm probably gonna look a bit weird now but what you want to be doing with those gamma tests is squinting your eyes so that you don't see individual pixels and then look at those vertical columns and see where the lines blend into each other and the number at which those lines blend into each other is the gamma the monitor has right now and i'm trying to change the gamma setting of the monitor to make it as close as possible to the 2.2 mark and legoms test so i'm gonna go to the monitors menu search for the gamma setting and we actually have a gamma setting that's called 2.2 but when i'm squinting my eyes i can see that it's actually a bit too low this is too low this is still too low this seems about right now the monitor now says it has a gamma of 2.4 but according to legomes test it's actually closer to 2.2 still it's not perfect and if you think you're needing additional adjustments you can open up your graphics card control software and here in the nvidia control panel for instance you will find additional gamma controls under the adjust desktop color settings tab and again with the lagom monitor test open we can adjust the gamma slider [Music] that looks about perfect so let's pull up the measurement device again and see how i did well not very good actually i was able to spot that the gamma was too low but then i overcorrected and went beyond the gamma target i'd have to say that i find these gamma calibration graphics pretty hard to use and i don't think they work well for precise gamma corrections now what about calibrating the brightness i mean by eye it's close to impossible to say which brightness this monitor has right now other than well saying it's either too bright or too dim for your personal taste conveniently though the typical smartphone has at least one brightness sensor built in so let's try using that i'll be using an app called lux lightmeter pro but there are tons of similar apps available for android and ios now i know that this monitor is at 138 nits right now because that's what i set it to by using a calorimeter so let's see how close the app can actually get now right from the start there's a bit of a problem the app only shows us lux which is a unit of illuminance but we actually want to know the brightness of the monitor or rather luminance which is measured in nits i really don't want to get in too much detail here but we can convert lux to nits by multiplying it with a simple factor conveniently the app already provides us with a calibration slider that we can use for that not so convenient though is that this factor can be very different depending on which smartphone you are using so we gotta find out this factor first we just gotta find out how bright the bright setting of the monitor is supposed to be and use that for a calibration we get this information either from reviews or from the spec sheet reviews are definitely preferred though so this monitor is supposed to go up to 350 nits according to acer so if the brightness turned up all the way now and now i just need to adjust the calibration slider until we get about 350 lux which should be 350 nits in this case [Music] just about there seems about right now that the calibration is done let's say i want to get this monitor to roughly 140 nits because that's a pretty good brightness for moderately bright rooms i already know that a brightness setting of 21 will get us as close as possible to that because i measured that with the calorimeter but let's see where we land using the app so we arrived at the brightness setting of 23 which is only two brightness steps above the settings i figured out using the calorimeter and that's pretty impressive that's not even five minutes over our brightness target and to our eyes that's almost the same brightness so yeah i think that was pretty successful the paper trick for dialing in the color temperature was also pretty good it actually worked much better than i thought it would only the gamma correction by i was kind of difficult and not very successful at least for me let me know if you have any other calibration tricks and tests you'd like me to check out as well and in case you want to see a guide on how to set up your monitor including all the other settings i highly recommend watching this video that i put on screen right now thanks for watching with some next video

Channel: techless

Views: 90,983

Keywords: monitor calibration, display calibration, color calibration, calibrate monitor without colorimeter, calibrate RGB, calibrate monitor, calibrate white point, calibrate brightness, colorimeter, monitor calibration test, monitor calibration tool, monitor calibration for photography

Id: avJTz1JhkR4

Length: 9min 54sec (594 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 24 2022