Workflow & Technology

Your Monitor Is Lying to You: How Calibration Fixes the Gap Between What You See and What Clients Get
Workflow & Technology

Your Monitor Is Lying to You: How Calibration Fixes the Gap Between What You See and What Clients Get

The Print That Made Me Look Like an Amateur A few years into my commercial work, I delivered a set of product shots to a fashion client. She called me the next morning. The garments, which were supposed to be a warm ivory, printed a flat, cold gray. I had edited on a beautiful, expensive monitor and was confident in every decision I made. The images looked perfect to me. The problem wasn’t my eye.

Your Monitor Is Lying to You: How Calibration Fixes the Invisible Gap in Your Photography Workflow
Workflow & Technology

Your Monitor Is Lying to You: How Calibration Fixes the Invisible Gap in Your Photography Workflow

The Print That Came Back Wrong A few years into shooting commercial work, I handed off a product catalog job to a client’s print vendor. The images looked clean on my screen, beautiful even. The printed proofs came back looking like someone had applied a yellow filter and drained about 30% of the saturation. The client was unhappy. The vendor blamed me. I blamed the vendor. We were both partially right, but the root cause was sitting on my desk the whole time: an uncalibrated monitor that had drifted so far from any color standard that I had no idea what I was actually sending out.