नेय्मलस Blog

Gamma is the key to highend colorcorrection and color grading. It is the most secret of secrets and knowing or not knowing about breaks or makes a compositors carrier.

On the other hand calibrating your monitor is actually quite simple. All you need is compile and install Monica or GammaPage and use the notes that comes with it. Calibrating the color of the clip to match the color grade of the human gamma scale needs a color grading software and has nothing to do with monitor gamma directly cause most monitor cannot show all the grades and so all transformations happens in mathmatical space. Nevertheless withought a gamma calibrated monitor you are much more in the dark and it is very dangerous to work with high color Films and clips on an unclibrated monitor. AND THIS IS A WARNING.

To download the monica or gammapage source click here. Monica GammaPage.

Uncompress and extract the source

Navigate to its folder and simply type:

make

and

make install

Now you can run monica by simply typing monica in the terminal.

Now comes the tough part.

If your minotor allows, then set it to 6500K.

Now fire up the calibrater by typing monica in the terminal.

You will see 4 windows on the top (Luma and RGB) and a Gamma scale chart below them.

Adjusting you monitor Gamma means simply adjusting the slider till the lines in the Gamma chart almost flattens.

The best way to do it is by sitting parallel about 2 metre to the monitor eyelevel (change of eyelevel affects gamma so keep that in mind)

Now start adjusting the sliders till the difference in (Gamma scale chart) grades dissapear or atleast merge. On a good monitor they will almost flaten. But if it doesnot, no problem, just get it as close as possible and then hit exit and save.

Repeat these steps on other monitors so that you get consistent gamma level always on all workstation.

GammaPage is even simpler to run. simply download, extract and in the terminal run: python setup.py install

For example if you have extracted it in: /home/username/Installers/gammapage-0.5.1/ type cd /home/username/Installers/gammapage-0.5.1 to navigate to its folder.

then simply type: sudo python setup.py install

It will build and install the application. Now all you have to so is type: GAMMApage and it will launch the application.

Follow the steps above as you did with monica.

Click on the Help button at the bottm for getting a hang on what it is doing.

There is a good discussion on the topic at: When to apply gamma correction?

Also visit the wiki and download and read this pdf

Some of the Good books to start understanding linear and logarithmic color space and what every 3d artist and a compositior should know.

The Art and Science of Digital Compositing. Second Edition. Ron Brinkmann (recomended)

Digital Compositing for Film and Video. Second Edition. Steve Wright