Longer articles that don’t fit anywhere else.
Every digital artist knows the pain; you’re trying to do a quick flood-fill into some line art and then suddenly you’re playing everyone’s favorite game, “spot the pixel gap.” Well, as fun as this activity is, there is a shortcut you can use to fill the gaps so that you can get along with making your art! This approach works in most current graphics applications which support layers and selection modification operations; I use it in Photoshop.
How to calibrate your monitor to the sRGB color space (more or less) without any special tools.
Note: This article was written way back in 2003, and things have changed quite a lot. The calibration charts are still useful for roughly calibrating TVs and projectors and the like, but there are better approaches to monitor calibration these days, and most decent monitors come pre-calibrated from the factory.
Also, these images only work correctly if they are displayed at a 1:1 pixel scale. Many combinations of newer monitors/operating systems/etc. — notably “high-DPI” or “Retina” displays — end up resampling images to display at a different pixel scale. This is fine for displaying most images, but these images will not work correctly when resampled. If you want to use these images for calibrating a display, please make sure they are displayed at 100% scale and that your monitor is set to a 1:1 pixel scale!
Nowadays my preferred method for calibrating a monitor is with a ColorMunki Smile (affiliate link). For a software-only approach on macOS you can try SuperCal, which is much more comprehensive than the built-in display calibrator.
