Calibrating Your Photography

Calibrations - Some say you have to calibrate your monitor.  Why?  No, really, why?  There are a lot more reasons why you don't need to than why you do.  If you are a professional photographer working on an ad campaign or for a magazine, then you would probably need to, although I know of one photographer who said she never does...and she is one of the top photographers in her field.  And photo labs need to calibrate their equipment to give their customers consistent results.  But for an individual photographer, calibration would add time and cost...and most likely not make a bit of difference in the end result.  He or she would need a much more expensive monitor, plus the calibration software.

If you send your photos to a lab, with proper instructions, after a few times they will learn how you like your images printed.  If you do them yourself, you will also learn how to get them to look the way you want.  Everyone has a different monitor, so unless everyone calibrates theirs, if you send them your images they will look different on their computer, tablet, or cell phone monitors anyway.  Also, everyone's color vision is not the same.  Once you have a print that you like, then all you have to do is lighten or darken the monitor to match, perhaps change a few other settings.  And from then on, what you see on your screen and the print output should be the same.  Actually, I suppose you could call that a calibration of sorts, but not the calibration photographers are talking about.

Back in the film days, when I used to make prints in the darkroom, I would make a test prints with several different exposures on strips of photo paper, and then look at them in the light to see which was best.  The same can be done now if needed.  If you're having a large print made (say 24x30 or larger), crop the most important part of the photo (say into a 4x5 of the same part of the image) and ask the lab for a few sample prints.  Then you can tell them which one you prefer.  You may also want to know what kind of light it will be viewed under (daylight, tungsten, how light or dark the environment, etc.) as that will affect how it will appear.  And finally, it may also depend on what material the image is printed on - paper, metal, canvas, wood, etc.

How you shoot the photo in your camera can also make a difference.  This is why I shoot in RAW - I can then adjust the white balance (color balance) in Lightroom if needed, along with any other adjustments without worrying about artifacts showing up (artifact, as used here, means any feature that is not naturally present but is a product of an extrinsic agent, method, or the like) fine-tuning it.  If I shot in jpg and had the wrong white balance set, and saved it multiple times trying to get the color balance correct, it might result in unwanted artifacts showing - perhaps banding, noise, etc. (see photos below).  You'll know when you see them.  Eliminate the variables.  White balance is one of them.  You don't need to think about camera calibration when you shoot in RAW, although you still need correct exposure, and once you know how your camera renders the images, you can set Lightroom (or whatever program you use) to adjust for color/white balance and exposure during import, and then

This is how I shoot and edit - it works very well for portraits, headshots, street photography, natural beauty, nature, or whatever else I shoot.  The important thing is that people love the final photos.

The photo above taken at the Santa Monica Pier is the original with some minor adjustments and saved once.

This second photo has been saved multiple times, resulting in more noise and artifacts, which is pretty obvious in the sky and the wooden pier.