Color

Color, the aspect of objects that is caused by the conflicting qualities of light reflection or emissions created out of them. Color therefore is an evidence of light presence. When you are inside a closed space, how do you know if an object is red or not? Without seeing that object first, it’s totally impossible for you to distinguish an object in a pitch black environment.

In television too, color is a reflection of light emitted by its underlying technology, be it CRT, LCD or plasma. Color is what controls the intensity of color in the pictures that are produced. The usual range of a color setting in a television is usually from gray to saturated level. The grayscale is the lowest setting in the color bar that displays clean white and black, and all colors represented by gray. When you set the color bar at a maximum, you get a super intense color, which is technically called saturation. A saturated color television picture will have human images look red skinned.

Color, like contrast and brightness, must also be set after a new TV unit is bought. If you have experience calibrating or tuning up TVs before, you may as well do the job for yourself although you can have skilled home theater calibrators hired to do the job for you in case you are not sure on how to do it. Here are some quick and basic color-tune-up slash-troubleshooting tips.

If it’s your first time or your TV’s first time to be color set, you must set first its color bar to zero. Drag it all the way down or push the adjustment bar to the left until you get full grayscale. The best way to do this is during an evening news cast where a human face is closed up. Adjusting color is best done using flesh tones since people know exactly how a real flesh color really looks like. If you can’t wait for the evening news however, just pop in any DVD title you have in your library, look for scenes with human face close ups. Now its time to color tune up your first color TV.

Start by gradually dragging up the color bar until you see visible skin tones. Try to push the color bar just a little more and see if there is no reddening that’s taking place on the images’ skin tones. If you push it too hard, you’d start seeing more red in the skin so bring it back to the closest-to-real-life flesh tone. And then you are done! Too much color and you start turning the TV people into Martians!

For troubleshooting, again pull the color bar down the grayscale. If your TV screen still display patches of coloration may be some blue or red blemishes even in an absolute zero color setting, then your TV has got a problem. Bring it to your nearest TV service center. Also, if your new color TV is displaying grayscale images even if the scenes on the show aren’t on your neighbor’s, then you should have the TV serviced or calibrated by an expert or better yet replaced.

Another important setting for your television is the color temperature. Color temperature should not be confused with color as these two settings are completely different. Color temperature which is expressed in the Kelvin scale, refers to the intensity of light and hue of source light present in the images. See, temperature really affects the way we see images in real life. How much more should it be for TV? The best and safest setting is to choose low for day light viewing and use warm color temperature when viewing at night or in lowly lit rooms.