Digital photos are made up of millions of tiny red, green, and blue dots called pixels (short for picture elements). Each one of these pixels is capable of displaying over sixteen million colors. Obviously, with all these possibilities, the accuracy of each pixel's color is quite critical if you are to see the precise colors that are captured with your camera.

Photographs are frozen moments of visual expression. When a digital camera captures those moments, the photographs are referred to as digital images.

Digital refers to numbers and values. Image, on the other hand, refers to a visual representation — like a painting or sculpture. But when the two words are combined, they take on a deeper meaning — a visual representation that uses numbers as its medium. At its core, that’s a pretty good description of a computer monitor.

Unfortunately, the many computer monitors on the market can differ significantly in the way they display colors. Computer monitors can only display truly accurate colors when properly calibrated. For this reason, it is virtually impossible to evaluate color correctly with an uncalibrated monitor.

In this chapter I'll describe how to calibrate your computer's monitor so that it displays correct color quite accurately. While there are manual/visual adjustments that can be made, the only really accurate method of calibration is achieved using a small electronic device called a monitor calibrator. Several of these devices will be described and recommended.

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