If you haven’t read my previous article about picking a monitor for color grading video, please check it out here. This article is a continuation of that article, and it specifically focuses on how to calibrate a monitor for video editing.

A professional color grading setup can easily cost $5k in hardware. You need a monitor with a high color accuracy that can also load correction lookup tables (LUTs)or you need a LUT box + a highly accurate monitor. Why do you need correction LUTs? Any monitor you buy is not going to be calibrated correctly for your environment or use. Even if the brand's marketing states it is factory calibrated, it still needs calibration once unboxed and repeatedly as you use it every few weeks. Here are a few additional reasons why calibration is so critical:

• The ambient lighting in your workspace can affect how your eyes perceive color. Your ambient lights could cast an off-white hue on your screen that you don’t notice, but ultimately affects your color grade. Calibration tools can take light readings from your room’s ambient lighting.

• Your monitor may display a wider gamut of colors than your final delivery format requires which will display your colors incorrectly. On my monitor, this can cause my edits to take on a red shift making everything look warmer than it actually is.

• Brightness almost always is set too high when using default settings.

• Calibration gives you confidence that what looks good on your monitor will most likely look good on others. I say most likely because you never know if someone has their TV set to max saturation and max contrast.

Visit Visual Captive for more details.