Calibrating and profiling a monitor is a procedure that every digital photographer should be familiar with and should perform frequently. It ensures that you are seeing accurate colors on your monitor. It also helps you to get prints that look like what you see on your screen. Monitors do not come from the factory pre-calibrated. Many monitors are preset to make colors look more vivid, bright, and saturated. That maybe appealing to many people when playing games, browsing the web, etc., but photos will not look the way they are intended to look until they are correctly calibrated. Therefore, it is essential that you spend the money and the time to calibrate and profile your monitor. If you do not, you are going to give yourself stress headaches when you run into problems that are inevitable. If you are a professional photographer and you sell your images, there is simply no excuse not to. Having a decent monitor is important for pros too (price is usually a good reflection of quality -- spend $300 or more). A cheap monitor can defeat the purpose of calibration.

Calibrating your monitor and profiling it are two different things; they are both important. Monitor calibration is the process of adjusting your monitor so it displays colors as accurately as possible. Every monitor is different. Two brand new monitors that are exactly the same brand and model will display colors somewhat differently. Furthermore, your monitor will change in the way it displays colors as it ages -- due to dimming of the backlight over time and other factors. The goal of monitor calibration is to get your monitor to display colors as close to a standard set of accurate colors as possible. No monitor will be able to exactly reach this standard though, so we can only get as close as possible -- optimally. Monitor profiling is the process of building a file, called an .icc file, that contains information on how your monitor displays colors. One piece of information included in an ICC profile is your monitor's gamut (the range of colors it can display). These ICC profiles are used by your operating system and other software to ensure your photos look the way you intend them to look. ICC profiles and software that uses them help to make sure your pictures look right on other monitors and print the way they look on the monitor. This is why monitor profiling is so important to a digital photographer and many other people. Monitor calibration and profiling are two things that are part of an effort to make colors look accurate and look the same on many different devices. This is called "Color Management."

The ICC profile name and the .icc file extension comes from an acronym for the International Color Consortium. The International Color Consortium is made up of technology companies with interests in color management. The ICC created the ICC profile format and is committed to keeping and spreading open and cross-platform standards for color management.

There are three ways to calibrate your monitor: by eye only, with free software and your eyes, and with a purchased software and hardware package. I do not recommend the first two methods, but I will mention them anyway. The last two methods also profile your monitor -- this is very important for color management when using images on numerous devices and in software applications.

The first method, by eye, is very simple. Take a photo of someone with a nice and natural skin tone in daylight. Open it up in Photoshop, or another photo editor, and print it out on a good printer. Use the best quality settings and print it on high quality glossy paper. Take the print and hold it up next to your monitor. Adjust your monitor's brightness, contrast, and color controls until you get the image on the screen to look like the print. This is a somewhat tedious and very inaccurate process. We all perceive colors in different ways. Our different energy and mental states will even affect how we see colors. So, at one time we may see colors one way and on a different occasion, we will see them differently. This makes this method highly subjective and therefore inaccurate. Since there is free and purchased software and hardware out there that will help you calibrate your monitor with better results, I would not even consider this method.