We’ve shared a few ways to get your monitor’s colour calibrated, but if you’re having trouble getting your dual monitors to match up, blogger Doc Rock recommends renting a colour meter from your local photo shop to get the job done. More »
Black and white has long been the default “artistic” style for photographs, so it can be easy to forget how compelling a colour photograph can be. Here’s an in-depth guide to help you get amazing colour in your photos. More »
Free web service CMYK Converter, as its name implies, converts your image files between RGB and CMYK colour models with a simple three-step process. More »
iPhone only: How do you know if the colour you want so much for your kitchen renovation is sea foam green or surf green? Let the Ben Color Capture App for iPhone help you figure it out. More »
If you’re in the market for a new desktop look or office paint, consider red or blue—they might just give a background boost to your creativity or attention to detail. A New York Times piece looks at the most recent study on “colour effects,” which try to determine whether performance is helped, hurt, or unaffected by colours—primarily red and blue, as those two shades have shown up again and again in previous studies. Take it with a grain of salt, but University of British Columbia researchers found that, in cognitive tests of 600 people: Red groups did better on tests of recall and attention to detail, like remembering words or checking spelling and punctuation. Blue groups did better on tests requiring imagination, like inventing creative uses for a brick or creating toys from shapes.
The article goes on to list a number of studies in which blue and red have made people appear more attractive, dominant, work more creatively, and so on.
Reinvent Wheel? Blue Room. Defusing a Bomb? Red Room. [New York Times]FlatPanelsDK, a Danish monitor information site, has a set of free tools available on their site. Available both as portable downloads and web based tools you’ll have your monitor tweaked in no time flat.
Windows only: Free application Calibrize holds your hand through a simple three-step monitor calibration to ensure on-screen colours look the same from computer to computer. Once you’ve run the application and adjusted the colour profile to its specifications, Calibrize saves the profile and automatically installs it on your system so the right colour profile always loads up. It’s quick and simple, especially if you don’t know much about screen calibration to begin with. For a no-download alternative, check out previously mentioned Screen Check. Calibrize is freeware, Windows only.
CalibrizeNeed an image with dark blue and green undertones for desktop wallpaper or a design project? Multicolr Search Lab, a free search utility, digs through roughly 3 million images in Flickr’s “Interesting” set for photos featuring the colours you select. You can make one colour more prominent by selecting it multiple times, and the results seem pretty genuine—my only complaint is that you have to find the colours with your eyes, and can’t put in hexadecimal or RGB values grabbed from graphics programs. The colour search engine also has a front end for Alamy Stock Photography for those in need of definite royalty-free images.
Multicolr Search Lab [via ReadWriteWeb]Calibrate your monitors for consistent tone and colour with web site Screen Check. The site displays two bars, one white-to-black for adjusting tone and the other covers the red/green/blue spectrum for adjusting colour. Just follow the Screen Check instructions and by the end you should have a reasonably well calibrated monitor. My Dell comes with a very similar built-in calibration tool, but if your monitor doesn’t, Screen Check is worth a look.
Screen Check [via UneasySilence]
