How to Color Calibrate Your Display

Lisa Gade shows you how to use a colorimeter to evaluate and color calibrate your laptop or desktop display. For those who don’t want to buy a colorimeter (a USB device that costs around $150), she also shows you how to use your graphics card’s calibration options and Windows built-in color calibration in the Display control panel. Why color calibrate your display? Beyond measuring brightness, contrast and color gamut, you’ll get a better looking picture that matches what the creator of the photo, video or website intended. Your color photo prints will match what you see on screen too. We use the Datacolor Spyder 4 Pro colorimeter with the Lenovo LaVie Z for this tutorial. X-Rite is the other popular colorimeter brand, and both do the job well.