I calibrated my monitor and now I hate how it looks!

jwbryson1 · Dec 16, 2012

I bought the Spyder4Pro unit and calibrated my Dell U2412M monitor and now I hate now it looks.

My blues now look a bit grey and my whites have a red tint to them. WTF?

Is that how it's supposed to work?

Mully · Dec 16, 2012

Start over in case you missed something

dxqcanada · Dec 16, 2012

Post an image that you just color corrected ... and we will see.

Light Guru · Dec 16, 2012

We're there any light sources shining on the display when you calibrated it.

John27 · Dec 16, 2012

+1 to above.

I always keep my blinds closed when I calibrate, and make sure to close them whenever I work on pictures. It's possible your reds were white and your greys were blue though! Post a color corrected image for us to see!

480sparky · Dec 16, 2012

John27 said:
.......reds were white and your greys were blue .......

Did we just have a Moody Blues moment?

Overread · Dec 16, 2012

Firstly remember that your eyes are adaptive, it could be that they just got used to the screen as it was before and your mind is just having a hard time getting newly adapted to the new appearance settings.

jwbryson1 · Dec 16, 2012

First time I used it there was too much ambient light in the room. NO DIRECT light, but a lot of ambient light. I went ahead and did it anyway. Then I waited until dark and fully recalibrated the monitor. The software indicated that it was the proper darkness to do the calibration. I still don't like how it looks.

But on my second calibration, I did not first do a factory reset to the colors. Is that necessary? In other words, I was starting where the last calibration had stopped.

I also have a question on whether I followed the instructions correctly. At one point, you are prompted to turn the brightness on your monitor to the 1/2 way point. My brightness goes from 0 to 100, so I dialed down the brightness to 50. But I'm not sure that's what I was supposed to do.

I will post a pic later when I get a chance.

Garbz · Dec 18, 2012

Are you switching between the calibrations to compare before and after? If so DON'T.

Your eyes adapt to what they see, often to the incorrect vision of the bright screen in front of you. There is only one scenario that would cause your monitor to display whites that don't look white REGARDLESS OF HOW IT'S CALIBRATED, and that scenario is that something has affected your eyes and they haven't adjusted to the look.

I'm serious I could right now set my display to a colour temperature of 9000k and after a few minutes it would look white to me despite really being horrendously blue. Eyes will adjust to make white look white. Calibration is about ensuring that whatever colour balance has been chosen stays consistent throughout the brightness values that will be displayed.

So with that in mind:
1) Make sure your room lights are dim, this goes double if you have energy saving bulbs.
2) If your room has a lot of natural light coming in then you need to colour balance your display to suit the colour of the light entering the room since your eyes will adjust to the ambient light around you.
3) Hit the calibration button and go make a coffee. Don't come back anytime soon. Just get away from your display so your eyes aren't adjusted to the wrong look. Your eyes are unreliable which is why you bought a Spyder4 to begin with.
4) If the display still looks bad after coming back consider calibrating to a different colour temperature again if you're having issues with the house lighting in other parts of the house.