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We consider monitor calibration and organization of the workspace to be interrelated goals.

Workplace Organization

To ensure correct colour rendition and colour perception needed for work with colour, we recommend sticking to the following principles.

1. Lighting conditions for your monitor should be stable. A room isolated from the sun with walls and furniture painted in a neutral gray colour will ensure the best lighting conditions. The main reason for the changing of illumination (and therefore colour perception) is natural light from windows, as it changes its characteristics depending on the time of the day. Therefore try to avoid it flooding the room during colour correction (for instance, you can close curtains tightly).

2. There should be a medium-bright light source in the room, illuminating the monitor, but located at a sufficient distance from it to be scattered (non-directional), for example, a ceiling light. The ideal colour temperature of light is 5000 K (D50 lamp) or 6500 K (D65 lamp). You can use general service lamps, but the stability of your colour perception will depend on the stability of the colour temperature of the source.

3. Try to avoid brightly coloured objects or spot light sources (for instance, a desk lamp) being in view when looking at your monitor. Bright and colourful things will affect your colour perception.

4. We recommend setting a neutral gray desktop wallpaper in the operating system (50 percent of gray), without any additional graphic elements. Any additional colour factor influences perception. Desktop wallpaper is one of the most serious hindrances to correct work with colour. Desktop wallpaper affects your perception when switching between programme windows. This is why a working space is medium gray by default in Adobe Photoshop and other professional graphics editors.

5. We recommend installing sRGB as the working colour space in your graphics editor. You can also use AdobeRGB and other wide colour spaces for monitors with a wide colour range, or if you are an advanced user, able to percieve out of range hues (those that are beyond the monitor's range). Using the monitor profile as your working colour space is a common mistake; in this case, colour manipulation will be incorrect by default.

Monitor Calibration

We recommend using the Eye-One Display 2 calibrator(the manual is available on the website iXBT.com) or Eye-One Pro spectrophotometer, if you calibrate monitors on your own.

If you calibrate the monitor yourself, we recommend that you take the following parameters into account:

• If your external lighting is stable, the temperature of the monitor should be about 1500K more than the temperature of the external lighting. If the external lighting is unstable (for instance, in case of laptop calibration), the monitor temperature can be set at 6500K.
• Luminance should be installed between 80-120 cd/m2. Extremely bright luminance is one of the most common mistakes in calibration. If the value is more than 120 cd/m2, images may be dark after printing (in this case, they are too bright on the monitor).
• The value of gamma affects only the display in theoperating system, and does not affect the display in Adobe Photoshop. Therefore, when working with this programme, the monitor can be calibrated to any gamma value. The recommended gamma for all operating systems, including Windows, Mac, Linux and others is 2.2.

The settings of the calibrated monitor (brightness, contrast, colour temperature, luminance, and others) should not be changed. If you have changed any of the parameters accidentally, it is necessary to reset it to the previous value. If this is not possible, the monitor will require recalibration. This especially affects Apple Cinema monitors, which do not have a black level chart.

The recommended frequency for monitor calibration is once every two weeks. In practice, the monitor may be sufficiently stable for much longer (one month, three months, six months or even a year), but it is impossible to guarantee this.

You can also use our monitor calibration service.

Viewing Conditions

When viewing a print on the paper:

1) Do not compare the print with the screen of the monitor:

• near
• simultaneously

Reflected and direct light have different physical natures and can not be perceived in the same way. Colour is a matter of feeling, and therefore should be carefully compared. It is perfect, if the images are compared with a pause of about a minute, first you look at the screen, then you pause, after that you look at the print. In real conditions, it is often sufficient simply not to look at the screen and the print simultaneously and not to place them next to each other.

2) View your images in normal lighting conditions. If the lighting is low, photographs may seem dark. Looking at the prints in the daytime by a window in non-sunny weather is an example of normal viewing conditions.

The section "Profiles" contains information on how to use the profiles of the machines for independent color correction when preparing files for printing. We would draw your attention to the fact that correct color manipulation is possible only in programmes with full Colour Management, for example, in Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Lightroom and other Adobe software.

Monitor Selection

For professional work with colour we recommend using S-IPS monitors, which display the colours correctly, regardless of the angle of viewing. The most common and most often recommended solution is NEC's professional Uxi and Sx series of monitors, for example, the NEC MultiSync LCD2690WUXi (you will find this reviewed on the website of Alexei Shadrin, an expert on the setting up and exploitation of colorimetric digital and printing colour reproduction systems), NEC MultiSync LCD2190UXi or NEC MultiSync LCD2090UXi. Another professional solution is to use Apple Cinema, monitors,though they lack a black level chart, which often leads to unexpected settings failures and so necessitate recalibration. You can use many other monitors, even non professional ones, but it is important to understand that the accuracy of colour management is directly dependent on the quality and colour range of your monitor.