SEEING AND BELIEVING

No professional photographer worth their salt would be without a calibrated monitor as the all-important starting point in a managed digital colour workflow, but it’s something many amateurs don’t use… and for a variety of reasons. For starters, a dedicated photo monitor can be quite expensive, especially in the larger screen sizes so, understandably, you might well think that money could be better spent elsewhere (such as on a new lens).

Secondly, you might believe that the screen that came with your computer is doing a good enough job.The reality is that’s very unlikely to be the case, something that would be very starkly revealed if you went to the trouble of having it calibrated.

Catering for photographers usually isn’t high on the list of considerations when a computer manufacturer is sourcing a display, and certainly not above saving money. The biggest deficiency with most computer monitors is a limited range of reproducible colours. Digital colour reproduction is organised into mathematical models called