r/Lightroom•
stema1984

Have a color accurate "reference monitor" on a budget (free?)

Tutorial

I have VA screens, which is generally good for everything, but not the best for each use. Had it calibrated (samsung g7 qled), but it's still off. I noticed that every apple device I have, no matter the display technology and generation, colors, contrast look almost exactly the same. I was looking at proart monitors and calibrite calibrators, but decided I want to cheap out, so I did this:
-Installed OBS Studio, cropped the screen to the 3:2 area of the lightroom worksspace's "fit" image part, started a virtual camera with it
-Used go2rtc to create an MJPEG stream out of it (mjpeg is good because it doesn't mess with small temporal changes as each frame is a separate image). I use 98% quality, anyway the output will be a jpeg, so it's perfectly fine for this use even with subsampling
-Opened the stream on my phone, added the page as a home screen button, when opening from there there's no navbar or anything
And there you go, I can use my phone, ipad, macbook air. Reviewers are always praising these displays how accurate they are and as I said, I never saw differences, maybe very mild ones, but certainly better than many solutions, and it is free if you have such a device.

Posted Sep 23, 2026, 8:40 AM UTC

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