iMac 24" Monitor Calibration - How?

[malbright]

Greetings,
What's the best way to calibrate my monitor? I realize that when I'm working with a specific printer I can calibrate to his equipment, but just in general, the colors are pretty far off from reality and I'm trying to get them a bit closer to real life, if you know what I mean. I'm doing a lot of color correction using this machine, and it's a bit scary right now.

Any advice would be greatly appreciated!

Cheers.

 

[Makosuke]

If you're doing that much pro-level color, you really should buy a calibrator. They're available for under $100 these days.

There is also the Apple-standard color calibration routine that you access via the Displays pref pane--I find the Advanced routine to work quite well for my non-professional needs. There is an old application called Supercal that still works ok under Leopard that uses a different system, but in my brief experiments it didn't work much (if any) better than Apple's.

But again, a proper hardware calibrator takes all the guesswork out of it.