Mac OS X Leopard - ARCAism

NOTE As you may have noticed, clicking Continue skips two steps: Set Up and Native
Gamma. Certain displays (predominately CRTs) will require extra steps to create a baseline for
the calibration. If you find yourself confronted with these steps, just follow the onscreen
instructions to work through them.
Figure 4-19. Selecting the target gamma in the Display Calibrator Assistant
CHAPTER 4 SYSTEM PREFERENCES 67
Continuing on from the gamma selection will take you to the screen where you can set the
display’s white point (Figure 4-20). White point is the strangest and most difficult-to-grasp concept
in color matching. Your eyes generally compensate for ambient light so that things that may
not be white appear white. This makes setting the white point of your monitor a bit of a trick to
do manually. In general, depending on the ambient light surrounding your computer, you will
find a comfortable white point around 6000 to 7500 Κ (Kelvin, which is how white point is
measured). For most modern displays, this should be right about where the native white point is,
so unless you really know you don’t want to use your native white point, I’d recommend using it.
NOTE Besides measuring white point in Kelvin (commonly referred to as the correlated color
temperature), there are other common names given to certain white points, such as D50 or
D65. D65 is also known as the Television white point, and is the default sRGB color space white
point.
NOTE If you use a hardware device to calibrate your monitor, it will have a weird effect on the
white point of your display—it will look wrong, even though it’s likely spot on. This is your eyes
playing tricks on you again (this is temporary, and lasts only until your eyes adjust to the new
white point setting).
After you set the white point, click the Continue button. If you are a systems administrator,
you will be prompted to choose if you’d like this profile to be available to users other than yourself;
if not, you’ll jump straight to the Name step, where you’ll be asked to name your new
profile (Figure 4-21). You can call your new profile anything you want, but I’d recommend
something sensible.