Laptop Display Calibration: Why And How

Laptop Display Calibration: Why And How – In recent years there has been an explosion of affordable “creator” monitors from companies like BenQ, ASUS, MSI, and Dell. Monitors are aimed at prosumers who want to make the most of their creative pursuits, but aren’t in the market for professional monitors from brands like EIZO and NEC. This explosion is paired with a growing interest in monitor calibration, because if you want to pony up the extra cash on a “color accurate” monitor, you’ll want to (a) confirm that the company hasn’t lied to you, and (b) make sure it’s for remains correct for many years.

Unfortunately, all this consumer interest in color accuracy hits a wall when it comes to educational content. Basic explanations of colorimetry and color calibration are few and far between (there are some excellent exceptions), and many of those that do exist are written by companies trying to sell you something. When I type “hardware vs software calibration” into Google, the first three results from BenQ, EIZO, and ViewSonic… aren’t exactly the unbiased educational content you’re looking for.

Laptop Display Calibration: Why And How

As long-time Internet photo-video nerds, we’re trying to fill that gap with some high-quality how-to articles on color measurement and calibration. Last month we went over the basics of colorimetry: how we measure and plot color, how the “Delta E” color distance metric is calculated, and how colorimeters work. Today we move on to the next topic: explaining exactly how monitor calibration actually works.

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Technical articles about display calibration can get very confusing, but that confusion often comes down to technical jargon being thrown around assuming you know what it all means. Terms such as “calibration curves”, “tone response curve”, “gray balance” and “gamut coverage” are often overlooked and the difference between a “profile” and “calibration” is never fully explained.

To try to avoid this confusion, we will stop and explain all our key terms as we go.

In the end, you should understand what your calibration software is trying to do every step of the way, and how the final product of a display calibration – typically an ICC profile – changes the colors displayed on the screen so that they are more accurate.

When starting a calibration, the first step is to manually adjust your brightness and (if possible) your white point using the on-screen controls available on the monitor. Every monitor gives you the option to manually adjust the brightness, but some also let you change the Red, Green, and Blue “gain” so you can manually adjust your white balance.

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The white point is simply the point in color space where your pure white display sits, and that exact point is determined by how much energy the red, green, and blue primaries contribute when they’re all turned up to 100%. For digital work, we usually aim for a white point of D65, which sits at (0.3127, 0.3298) in xy chromaticity space and correlates to a color temperature of 6500K (so D65).

Here is the color gamut of an AERO 16 OLED laptop display I recently tested. The red, green and blue dots are the primaries, and the white dot is my white dot.

When calibration begins, the software displays a patch of pure white and prompts you to manually adjust your monitor settings until you reach your target values. This is usually accompanied by a helpful little dialog box that shows you how close (or far) you are and how to adjust each setting to get things right.

This screenshot from the free open-source calibration software DisplayCal shows a before and after image of this dialog box. In this case, I aimed for a luminance of 150 candela per square meter (aka nits) and a white point of D65, and when I reached those values, I could click “stop measurement” and then “continue calibration” .

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If you have applied the brightness and the white point to the greatest extent that your monitor allows, the software will take over. It measures a full gray ramp from pure black (0, 0, 0) to full white (255, 255, 255), tracking your monitor’s tone response curve and gray balance as it goes.

These two terms describe two different aspects of your monitor’s ability to create smooth and color-accurate transitions from your darkest to your lightest gray values.

Tone Response describes the relationship between the input value sent by your GPU and the output actually displayed on the screen. As you probably already know, your screen does not show perfectly divided linear brightness steps between pure black and pure white; instead, the output follows a gamma or “transfer function”, which is usually a power of about 2.2.

This calculation is actually applied to values ​​ranging from (0, 0, 0) for pure black to (1, 1, 1) for pure white, and then the values ​​are multiplied by 255 to give us the 256 color values ​​from 0-255 to become what we are used to seeing 8-bit RGB.

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= 1), but all values ​​between 0 and 1 should follow a smooth exponential function. In the graph below, I measured nine points from pure black to pure white on my MacBook Pro 14 and plotted them against the idealized gamma of 2.2:

In “Photography – P3” mode, my uncalibrated MacBook Pro 14’s sound response comes close but can’t quite match a gamma of 2.2.

Tone response describes how smoothly the gray values ​​ramp in terms of their luminance relative to pure white, but this is not the whole story. Not only do we want the brightness of gray to ramp smoothly from black to white, we also want “gray” to stay “gray”. If there are color shifts in the way, your “neutral” colors aren’t really neutral.

This is where gray balance comes in. As it measures the lightness of the gray values, the software also plots their location in color space, AKA their chromaticity.

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Remember from our intro to colorimetry, chromaticity ignores luminance and only tells us about color, so every gray value ideally plots to the same point in this (x, y) space. This means that they are all the same color, only changing in brightness. Of course, this is almost never the case in practice. In the graphs below, I have plotted the gray balance of my MacBook Pro. Because the points are so close together, the right panel is enlarged so you can actually see the distribution:

Gray balance of the MacBook Pro 14’s display in even steps from dark gray to pure white. Zoom in on the right side for visibility.

And here is the gray balance of an MSI gaming monitor I had nearby, which has a very similar color range but is much less accurate. This monitor prioritizes speed over color accuracy, and that’s evident when you look at the gray balance. The dark grays have a significant green cast that gradually fades as the grays become lighter and lighter:

Gray balance of an MSI gaming monitor and even steps from dark gray to pure white. Zoom in on the right side for visibility.

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If the gray value moves around a bunch, it means that the red, green and blue components of the signal are not properly balanced as you go from black to white, and this must be adjusted during calibration to produce a smooth tone response curve and a stable white dot.

After taking these measurements, the software has everything it needs to adjust your monitor’s output so that it more closely resembles some ideal target values ​​that you can set in software. And it does this with something called calibration curves.

Calibration curves include instructions for fixing the small imperfections in how your monitor displays color and brightness information. A typical display calibration will produce three different calibration curves, or 1D look-up tables (LUTs): one for the red channel, one for the green channel, and one for the blue channel. Everyone tells your GPU “hey, if you want to send this value, send it

Made from calibration curves showing the adjustments made to “correct” the response of the red, green and blue values ​​from 0 (darkest) to 255 (brightest).

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If the display were perfect, these lines would be perfectly straight and overlapping from 0 to 255. But since the display has some imperfections, the calibration software has created three independent corrections for the red, green, and blue channels that try to do two things at once:

Additionally, if you are unable to adjust your white point using manual controls in step 1, the calibration curves will attempt to adjust this as well by clipping the brightest reds, greens, and blues until the balance is correct.

The better your monitor is out of the box – with smooth tonal response and stable gray balance – and the closer you can get to your white point with manual monitor controls, the less this calibration

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