When I was a young boy my mother used to put “bluing” into loads of white laundry.  If you’ve ever seen bluing you know that it is very blue indeed–about as blue as blue food coloring.  Subtle it is most definitely not!  Mom would add a small about of this concoction to a load of laundry to “make it whiter.”  I really couldn’t understand that for a long time.  Then one winter day I was playing outside in the purest white new-fallen snow and I noticed something very unexpected: there was a distinct blue hue to it! When I dug into it a bit, the lower part of the hole was even more deeply blue.

Clearly to me adding blue to white made the color seem even more white.  Later in life I came to understand that some people preferred their whites a little yellow, or even pink.  Until today however, I always considered my own preference the correct one.

What an amazing lesson I got from Peter today!  By profiling my monitor, he showed me in the clearest possible terms that my idea of white was terribly skewed toward blue.  Apparently this is an American tendency.

Like Ken Rockwell, Peter, and many others I tend to like images a little on the warm side, but I was completely unprepared for what I saw on my monitor after it had been profiled.  So yellow were the “white” window backgrounds and even the grays of my Windows color scheme that I thought the profiler had made a terrible error.

As the minutes passed I witnessed the marvel that is the human brain as it became accustomed to seeing colors correctly and then I could see the blue in things I previously thought were white and the white in things I had considered yellow!

Take a look at the three versions below of the same close-up image of my eye.

In the first, you see exactly what came out of my camera.  This image was taken hand-held in the cab of my pickup truck while sitting in the parking lot of the little strip mall where I get my hair cut.  As you can easily see, the white balance is off and the image is too dark.

Next you can see the version I posted on my Web Gallery, and printed to show friends and family.  I brightened and sharpened this image and I warmed up the colors so they looked more natural to me.  Notice how orange this image actually is.  It is this way because my monitor was way too cold–too blue.

Finally, the third version is one I corrected using my calibrated monitor today.  With my monitor telling me what’s really there–and some guidance from Peter’s practiced eye–I was able to correct the white balance, brightness, contrast, and color temperature in this image much more accurately.

The lesson? It really is important to profile your monitor.  It’s not just something for fanatics.Profiling was done using Monaco’s OPTIX XR Pro like this: Monaco Systems Optix XR Pro, Color Calibrator for Monitors, 5 Seat License, for Mac. & Windows.