Reduce monitor resolution to ease calibration

Jun 26, '07 07:30:00AM

Contributed by: Pedro Estarque

There have been some interesting things going on in the browser battlefield regarding color managing, as seen in these two blog posts:

Safari brings color-managed browsing to Windows
Color Spaces

The web, as it currently stands, is basically an unmanaged environment. But that might change with Safari for Windows and future versions of Firefox. Calibrating your monitor will be more and more important if this turns out to be true. So I thought I might share something that I've learned from calibrating current large LCDs.

Eyeballs are no replacement for hardware calibration, but they are free and readily available, as is Apple's ColorSync Display Calibrator. The problem is that monitors have come a long way in recent years, but Apple's software is essentially a port from OS 8 and haven't changed much since. The Apple logo and grey background were fine for 800x600 and 1024x768 days, but look pretty small on 1920x1200.

If you change the resolution to 640x480 before calibrating, you get two advantages: One, the Display Calibrator takes the entire screen; two, the image gets blurry and you don't have to squint as much in order to blend the Apple logo with the background. I found that changing the resolution led to a much better result. Just remember to choose Hide Others from the Apple menu before changing the resolution, or else you'll end up with lots of tiny windows everywhere when you get back to your native resolution.

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