Digital photos: Part one - Picture perfect

Adobe Gamma
Another solution is to use a visual calibration tool. The best example of this is Adobe Gamma, which is a control panel installed automatically with Photoshop Elements, Photoshop and other Adobe products.

If Adobe software is installed, Adobe Gamma can usually be found in the Control Panel folder. Adobe Gamma can either be used as a step-by-step wizard or as a standard Control Panel. The latter is quicker and more straightforward.

There are some options here designed for non-LCD monitors and they will ask for information you won’t have, such as the Phosphors and the White Point settings. These can be left at their defaults if you are using a flat-screen monitor.

The main things to adjust to ensure accurate colours are the brightness, contrast and colours. First, use the monitor’s own on-screen menus to adjust the brightness and contrast so that it’s just possible to see the difference between the black and dark-grey boxes in the strip towards the top of the dialogue box, while the white strip below remains a bright white.

Next, deselect the ‘View Single Gamma’ box below. Now there are three coloured boxes – red, green and blue. Each one has a slider below it. Move the slider until the square in the middle matches the tone of the striped pattern around it – squinting can make this easier to judge.

This achieves two things. First, it adjusts the overall brightness of the display (many displays are too bright by default and make photos look brighter than they are). Second, it adjusts the balance of the red, green and blue so the colours are truly neutral, so they don’t have that ‘blue-white’ tone that makes monitors look so brilliant and clear.

The only disadvantage with Adobe Gamma is that it relies on human eyesight and judgement to determine when tones match. This isn’t ideal. For truly accurate colours, it’s necessary to scientifically measure the colours the monitor displays.

This is what devices like the Pantone Huey do. This dangles over the screen while the software runs through a calibration routine. The device measures the colours the screen produces, compares them against the colours it ought to produce, and then generates a correction ‘profile’.

Most professionals would choose a hardware calibration device like the Pantone Huey, but the Adobe Gamma is probably good enough for the rest of us.