Have you considered how your monitor is doing lately? Is it displaying the correct colors? Is is bright enough or too bright? Time for a check-up!
It's so easy to forget to think the correctness of your monitor's display. You log onto your computer everyday and because you are seeing what you saw the day before, you assume it is correct.
But is it?
I have discovered when I wander around in the computer sections of stores, that I can easily tell if a monitor is good or set correctly. I can also tell if my laptop's display has become messed up in a flash.
Want to know how?
I just wander out to the Scrap Girls forum and look at the colors.
Scrap Girls purple is pink-based. If your monitor is displaying a blue-based purple, it is off.
You are probably wondering how you will ever be able tell, right? That's easy, too, assuming you have a good photo printer. All you need to do is make a *screen-shot and print it out. You should then see the correct color of purple and you can adjust your monitor to match it. (Assuming, of course, that you have a photo printer that prints colors correctly.)
I discovered this little trick over three years ago. I was shipping out the Cd's at that time and I became frustrated because my Canon i9100 kept printing the labels with a pink-based purple. But I was seeing the blue-based purple on my laptop's screen and I assumed that was correct. One day, I printed the labels over and over again, trying get them to match. Because the printer wouldn't mind me, I decided to give up.
A few months later, my laptop started to give out and so I went to the computer store to buy a desktop. Flat-screen LCD monitors were relatively new at that time so I had never seen one. When I was shopping for the monitor, I decided to go out to ScrapGirls.com and see how it looks.
I was stunned!
I started yelling, "Oh, it's so PRETTY! It's so PRETTY!"
I was thrilled. The color matched the printer and I liked it much better than the blue-based purple I had been seeing for the past year. Of course, I purchased that monitor and soon noticed that my digital scrapbooking layouts were looking better. I was having an easier time getting the color right and was pleased that everything printed out exactly as they looked on the monitor.
I remembered that lesson and when it came time to buy my new laptop (this was a couple of years ago), I drove the sales guys crazy because I wouldn't consider anything that wouldn't allow me to get the purple right. A technician finally got an idea. He downloaded an updated driver for the NVIDIA driver on the laptop I have. I played around with the settings to make sure I could get the Scrap Girls purple right.
Who would think that purple could be such a telling color? And who would think that Scrap Girls website accidentally became a method of checking your monitor's calibration?
If you need to calibrate your monitor manually, you may need to adjust the brightness, digital vibrancy, gamma and hue. It can be tricky and all drivers won't allow you to adjust these particular settings, but don't give up. It's worth it!
Digital scrapbooking is such a fun hobby. Don't let your monitor interfere with your results!
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P.S. If you really get stuck, perhaps your computer technician can help you.
P.P. S. To make a screen shot on a PC: Hit Alt+Print screen. Insert it into Photoshop Elements, Photoshop, or a Word document and then print out the document.
