Conquer Your Colour Scheme

I get a lot of emails and letters asking why the colours in printed photos sometimes don’t match what’s on the screen? Sometimes it’s the printer, but more often than not it’s simply that the monitor hasn’t been properly set up. Monitor calibration is essential if you work with graphics or photo editing software but how many of us ever take the time to adjust our monitors, apart from twiddling the brightness and contrast controls? Not many, I bet, but there’s no excuse any more. A freeware program called Calibrize takes you gently by the hand, and in three simple steps helps you to adjust your display; from start to finish it only takes around 2 minutes and the new settings or colour ‘profile’ is then saved and applied every time you start Windows. It’s also handy for those who, like me, use two monitors, making it easy to accurately match the two displays.

23/10/08

Is My LCD OK? Well, Is it?

Here’s one way to find out, a small freeware program called, you guessed it, IsMylcdOK. It’s a simple LCD monitor checker program that displays a series of solid colours, gradients and horizontal and vertical lines that will show up most of the common faults on flat screen monitors. These include dead or ‘hot’ (always on) pixels, faulty backlights and incorrect video phase setting. The program download is tiny, around 15kb, and it doesn’t even need to be installed, it runs from the zip/exe file, or from a pen drive. It is really easy to use; though watch out for the intro screen, it’s in German, so click the English button to continue (unless you are, or speak German, of course). To select a particular test just hit the appropriate number key no your keyboard, or cycle the tests by pressing any key, and to quit just press the Escape key. Here’s hoping you get a clean bill of heath!

0506

Free Video Capture Makes its Debut

If it moves and it appears on your PC screen then you can capture it with this freeware application, called Debut. Now don’t get too excited, it can record streamed video (and audio), like You Tube and iPlayer, but the unless you have a blisteringly fast PC the frame rate will probably be quite slow if you don’t want to sacrifice too much picture quality, but it’s definitely worth experimenting and its certainly good enough for a quick and dirty archive. It’s just the job for making tutorial videos, showing someone how to do something on a PC, by recording everything that happens on the screen. It also has a built in timer and it can be set to email or upload your movie by FTP. You can even get it to burn directly to DVD with an optional add-on and there’s a facility to record from external sources like web-cams and USB capture devices.

28/04/08