When the topic of color calibration comes up I normally make a quick dive under my desk and hide there until I know it’s gone far far away. Color calibration can be confusing, overwhelming and most of all frustrating.

Normally I hold such great disdain for the topic that even when I hear other people talk about it I plug my ears and go “nah nah nah nah nah” until it’s over. But today, a short and sweet conversation I picked up on between Sam and one of our new clients made me smile and look at calibration in a whole new light.

The gist of the conversation basically explained that our sight for color works much like our other senses in the fact that it is quite a bit relative and it also needs a standard of reference to be talked about accurately.

If you have a mouth full of hot peppers, you’re not going to be able to smell or taste a birthday cake the way it was created to be tasted. In the same way, the colors you have in your workspace will affect your perception of the colors on your computer screen. Color calibration equipment is really important to combat against this. Your lights, the color of your walls, even the clothes you wear all affect the way you perceive the colors on your screen to be.

Think of musicians and vocalists who spend years learning perfect pitch – how to create the notes exactly as they are meant to be made. An orchestra of people all playing a piece of music together in tune can be one of the most majestic experiences. An orchestra of people all playing their own version of C#m is cacophonous. In this same respect, the way you calibrate your prints needs to match up with the way your lab utilizes the images in printing. When everyone is in calibration, the images that come off the printer are a symphony for the eyes.

Now, there’s much you can do on your end to make sure your prints are edited correctly using well calibrated equipment. But all of that hard work and effort goes completely down the drain the second you send your prints to Walmart, Shutterfly, Costco or any other major consumer photo retailer. Without a professional lab’s careful calibration of their printing equipment, your calibration work is useless.

^Sam helping a new client understand monitor calibration equipment and how to utilize it with her laptop.

Here at Fotoworks, we calibrate several times a day – each time we switch paper sizes, each time we reload paper, each time the temperature in the lab changes a few degrees…. it’s this calibration that allows us to commit to you that if you print the same image with us today that you printed a year ago, the print will come out the same. Consistency on our end makes all of your hard work pay off.

All the best,

Katie