monitor calibration problems

molsen · Nov 7, 2008

I already tried out a Huey, but I tried two and both had the famous magenta cast, so I just returned for a refund.

So now I have the Spyder2 Express. Definitely easy to use, but I'm not sold on its accuracy.

On my home LCD, the color temperature looks way to warm - especially in the grays. They don't like gray to me at all. I thought maybe I was just used to how it looked before so I left for a couple hours and came back. It still looks way off to me! Not only that, but images viewed in Windows photo viewer looked different than they do in Photoshop - which has NEVER happened to me before.

On my laptop screen, the colors are a bit warm, but my main issue is that blues end up turning purplish. Even more weird is the colors differ in Firefox vs. Safari. Does the logo at the top of this page have dark purple text to you? http://freshministries.org/ Because it sure looks that way to me now, and I definitely made it to be blue. What about this guy's shirt? http://www.flickr.com/photos/flibbajabba/2916881879/ purple? supposed to be bluish

So I'm really frustrated now. My monitors were PRETTY well calibrated before - I just wanted to get the hardware to make some fine adjustments and be sure everything was 100%. Now I don't know what's right!

AFAIK, I've disabled all software color adjustments, Adobe Gamma, other color profiles, etc.

I take great care in making sure all color profiles in my applications are the same and that my colors look the same from screen to screen - now everything is out of whack.

Any help? I'm going crazy!!!

molsen · Nov 7, 2008

well i "acquired" the spyder3 pro software and that allowed me to calibrate my laptop screen properly. HOORAY!

now, the only issue I'm having is with photoshop. images look different in it vs. how they look in windows explorer. I want to edit everything in sRGB, so what's my solution?

example:
http://picsorban.com/upload/wtfcolorsettings.jpg

davebmck · Nov 8, 2008

Windows Explorer is not a color managed application. Not much you can do with it other than using sRGB. That is pretty much standard for web applications.

Garbz · Nov 10, 2008

To expand on that. When you calibrate you end up with a colour profile in the windows systems. Output colour managed applications take this profile so they know how to adjust the colours so they look correct when they are displayed. The profile can be selected in the display controls for windows under advanced -> colour settings, but this should be set automatically by the calibrator meaning it's doing it's job properly.

To see if photoshop is reading the right profile click edit -> colour settings, select the down arrow next to RGB working spaces and simply look (don't select) at Monitor RGB. This should have the profile next to it e.g. mine says "Monitor RGB - LCD2690WUXi 811.... 05/11/2008 D55 2.2" which is the screen, serial number, date, calibration target CT and curve.

If photoshop is correctly filling in something under Monitor RGB then in theory it is displaying more correct colours than all your other programs. This has nothing to do with sRGB which is an input colour profile. You need software that's output colour managed like ACDSee Pro2 to view files the same way photoshop does.

molsen · Nov 12, 2008

so which is correct? did i calibrate my monitor so that photoshop would show the colors right and nothing else...?

Garbz · Nov 12, 2008

Depends how it was done. The calibration program should load the correct gamma profile into your videocard on startup to make sure that your greys are a consistent neutral colour over the range, and the grey range matches one of the target curves (gamma 2.2 in this case). All applications benefit from this.
But the program also loads the ICC profile into the windows system. This profile has a complete set of identifiers including how red is the red, how green is the green and how blue is the blue.

Only colour managed programs can benefit from the latter meaning photoshop, if it's working correctly and the ICC profile is right, open the image and then manipulates the colours to make sure that for instance the reddest red in the picture profile (sRGB normally) is not more red then it should be when displayed.

For example if you have a screen that can display a wide gamut like AdobeRGB, then photoshop displays the correct colours, and a non-colourmanaged application displays an oversaturated image, usually a tad on the red side. This is because photoshop knows that the reddest red on the screen is redder than the reddest red on the picture, and compensates by reducing the saturation so that it displays correctly according to what the colourprofile, and thus hopefully the screen says.

Here is the example from my screen. On the left a output colour aware image viewer (ACDSee Pro2) on the right Windows Pic and Fax viewer showing the heavily saturated image:

If you think that photoshop is wrong then chances are that the ICC profile isn't right (the one made by your calibration software) or that photoshop has the wrong one loaded as Monitor RGB.

But if photoshop is right... Welcome to colour management