CalMAN RGB How-To: Advanced Calibration, Part 1
The Standard Calibration is great for the occasional touch-up or quick adjustment, but to unlock CalMAN RGB’s full potential, you want to select Advanced Calibration from the first screen.
If it’s your first time calibrating a particular monitor, you should run through the full Advanced Calibration routine in order to hit every imaging parameter. Standard only adjusts the grayscale. In the Advanced workflow, you can calibrate everything: brightness, contrast, grayscale, gamma, and color gamut. Even if your monitor’s OSD doesn’t support all of those adjustments, CalMAN will create a look-up table to make up that shortfall. If your display can be controlled via DDC (a majority can), CalMAN accesses those controls directly during the calibration. You never have to open the OSD yourself. And using windows we’ll show you later, you can access the adjustments manually if you wish.
If a meter name appears under the Find Meter button, that step is done. Select Calibration Profile gives you three options for picture modes. Those are set up by CalMAN, so you can easily create multiple profiles and switch between them using the PC Client icon in the system tray.
In the next window, you set your white point and gamma targets. While it appears as though there’s no option for a gamut target, there actually is. Open the settings panel from the upper-right.
Under the first tab, Workflow Basic Options, you can specify the color target. Since we’re working with Dell's UP3214Q, we'll choose Adobe RGB.
Each gamma option is slightly different in appearance, and you’ll have to choose the one that matches your intended source material. In almost all cases, sRGB or Power is the correct choice. If you choose Power, you can specify any value you wish. PC is 2.2 and Mac is 2.0.
Now that you’ve set your parameters for color, grayscale, and gamma, the calibration itself begins.
