Calibration needed for WB correction ?

General Color & Graphics Monitor Calibration & Soft Proofing
1

Hello,

I have a basic question:
Do we need to have a screen calibrated in order to make a good white balance correction on raw pictures ?
Or the screen has nothing to do with this WB correction.

For information I’m using Bibble Pro to do this and I normally not change any other colours except when going into B&W transformation…:wink:

Do you guys think it is still necessary to calibrate the screen or not ?
I’m working on a Thinkpad laptop, so I guess it’s not the easiest screen to calibrate.
If yes, what do you recommand for an enthousiastic photographer, but not professionnal ?

Thanks for your help
Kris

2

Hi Kris,

I’m not familiar with Bibble, but the white balance procedure in most programs will not be affected by what monitor profile you are using.

It’s always a good idea to calibrate and profile your display of course, just so that you can have more accuracy with what you are seeing. But it would not affect the actual function of the white balancing.

3

Thanks for your answer, Patrick.

I visited your chromix website and saw that you are selling a few of those calibration tool.

What would be your advice, knowing that I need to calibrate:

  1. Thinkpad laptop screen
  2. LCD screens
  3. LCD television
  4. Eventually CRT screens

Thanks again
Kris

4

Hi Kris,

All of the colorimeters we carry work well for LCDs and CRT displays. The i1 Match software has a special wizard path just for laptops, so you might find it easier to use. The Monaco Optix is considered one of the best colorimeters out there - even though it has been discontinued by Xrite. If you tend to upgrade quickly to the latest operating systems, you should probably get the i1 instead of the Optix. While Xrite has committed to support the Optix for the next 6 years, they are not as quick to come out with updated drivers and such as they are with their current products. CHROMiX has a few of these gems left, but not many.

The issue of calibrating an LCD television comes down to what controls are available to adjust the color on the screen. The greater part of the color correction on a computer display happens in the graphics card, but you usually don’t have that with a TV. However, even if you only have Red Green and Blue color controls on a TV, you can use them to white balance the TV to the color temperature you want by running the calibration software on a laptop and using the colorimeter to read the color off of the TV screen.