Monitor Calibration

After the initial dissapointed with the colour rendition of the 16-45 and the subsequent help from Matt (thanks again Matt) to sort out my workflow and monitor settings using Wiziwyg, I was still not confident that I had the monitor calibrated correctly.....so I went out and bought the GreytagMacbeth Pantone Heuy.

Now this is a piece of kit that we should all have (or similar), my images look so much better, it's even cut down on the amount of correcting I've been doing to RAW files in C1, believe it or not it looks like an incorrectly calibrated monitor even has a bearing on the exposure look of a raw file (am I correct matt). Another nice addition is if you leave the Heuy plugged in it measures the ambient light in the room and compensates the monitor settings automatically for any changes.

For £65 it has to be worth the money.

OK you convinced me! Where can I buy one.

Hi Ammonyte

I've sent you a PM with the link, don't want somebody to nip in before you.
Excellent service too, I recieved the item within 48 hours.

I think that I have to buy a calibration unit as well...
I calibrated the monitor carefully with Wiziwyg and on screen everything looks nice and the colours look bright and vivid. But I ordered some test prints and they are all quite bland... So I think I have to do some more testing with the calibration...

Matt, could something like this be caused by calibrating to D65 instead of D50 with a TFT?

In answer to your probs & questions:

There is a difference between calibration and profiling.

Calibration will get the colours looking good (e.g. an orange from Photoshop will show as orange on the monitor).
Profiling will establish exactly what the colours are so that Photoshop can know the mapping between a colour space and the monitor.

Now, with WiziWYG it'll get you calibrated, but unless you can achieve the first part where you setup the white and black squares you won't get a good white and black point. This typically happens on LCDs, and more so on aging LCDs - because the backlight dims over time.

Your ambient light plays a part too. With the Spyder 2 I found my ambient light was way too high for the LCDs I have, and was surprised at how low it should be. The Spyder 2 also suggested D50, rather than D65, as D50 was more achievable on the laptop I have.

However, as I've said before there isn't much you can do if, for instance, you have a 2 year old LCD that cost a couple of hundred pounds - even a Spyder might not be able to bring it "in line". For example, I have what was an expensive Dell 17" TFT, which has trouble achieving a decent setting - the backlight has dimmed quite a lot. My current reference is a half-decent ultrasharp Dell - which performs not badly, but could be better I reckon the Lacie 120 is going to be next.

But, in answer to the question of D50 vs D65, that shouldn't produce "dull" results. The best thing is to get the companies reference print and compare on screen (rather than printing your own reference). For example, Photobox do their own test print - which they will post before an order if you ask nicely That gives a reasonable reference... but then there are other issues involved (for example they accept sRGB colour space images, but their equipment isn't quite sRGB, so the prints come out slightly darker. Most people on the web apply a curves to lighten it up a bit, but I rootled around the net and found a close profile which works much better )

You see, not all print companies profile their printers either

(ProAMimaging have a very good profile that gives dead-on results for me)

No matter how much you know about colour management and profiling, there'll always be something lurking there to get you banging your head against the wall!

Matt

Thanks for the information Matt.

I am starting to think more and more towards investing in a decent monitor.
The problem is that the focus of TFT producers is not directed at image quality, but more on response times. I haven't succeeded in finding a good reference for which TFT's are good for imaging jobs and which are affordable for a normal human being
Another option is to get a seperate PC for this work to which I hook up my old IIyama vision master pro 450 CRT monitor. This beast is to big to place in the living room

The LaCie 119 and 120's are not too badly priced, more expensive than a lot of TFT's, of course

And they seem well spec'd, colourwise and for editing.

Matt

Thanks, I have ordered one! looking forward to playing with, sorry, I mean using it!

It's about 400 Euro's here, so that is not that shocking, thinking about the fact that I payed 300 Euro's for my current TFT which is allmost 3 years old now when I think of it...

What I like about the LaCie is the slower response time, most of the 20ms panels supported the full 16,7M colours. The faster panels often use dithering which can have some very ill effects on colour rendition.

The thing is that LaCie is not widely available here.

Can you now share it with us as well where you bought it?

EvilBay

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Gretag-Macbeth-PANTONE-huey-Monitor-Colour-Calibration_W0Q...

Just did a quick test with my old iiyama vision master pro 450 CRT. And presto, after using wiziwyg for this monitor the colour rendition looks allmost spot on to the printed result.

So it is safe to say that my TFT is at fault. The downside of the CRT is the huge size on the desk and the fact that even at 100Hz it is not as easy on the eyes as a TFT is.

I set the whitepoint in the monitor to 6500k (you can select 5000, 6500 and 9300).

Then I used standard trinitron as the monitor and D65 as white point. I set the gamma at 2.2

[edit]
just did some checking and a decent TFT costs from around 400 to 600 Euro's. I can buy an aditional PC for that money with a decent processor and a decent amount of memory... I'll use the Iiyama with it. So all in all I am starting to believe that a good CRT is hard to beat....
[/edit]

I don't want to hijack this thread but it seems like lots of knowledgeable people are all in this same "room" together and I think this is my best chance to try and get to the bottom of a particular problem.

I've had an *istDS for a year. Apart from that I am in the process of scanning 30 years worth of colour slides using a Canoscan slide scanner. I'm using Photoshop 4.0LE (which came with the scanner) for cleaning up and adjusting the slides. I also use this for processing digital images from the DS. I've noticed when I view a processed JPG in Explorer, or Windows Image Viewer, it is significantly darker than in PS. I thought I'd found the answer in the 'Basic Colour Management' thread, but after using the WiziWYG utility, the problem seems much worse.

I have a Dell P790 CRT monitor (not listed in WiziWYG). My graphics card is a TNT2 Model 64 which has an 'Advanced' tab on the Screen Properties dialogue. This lets you set the Brightness, Contrast and Gamma. I had previously set the Gamma to 1.8 (I read somewhere that was the correct thing to do).

So, what I don't understand is...
1. How does the TNT Gamma interact with that set by WiziWYG, i.e. what should I set the TNT Brightness, Contrast and Gamma to, before I run WiziWYG?

2. In step 4 of the WiziWYG setup, it says to reduce the monitor Contrast until the white rectangles almost disappear. They never disappear, until the screen is almost too dark to see anything at all!!

3. The P790 monitor allows setting of the Color Temp. I've set this to 6,500K. Does this correspond to D65, and is that what I should be doing?

4. PS 4.0LE is obviously very old. It doesn't have the colour correction settings described in the Colour Management thread, although it *is* taking notice of something as colours are displayed differently from other Windows programs.

5. Finally, Dell do supply a P790.icc file, which I have set as the Default Color Profile in Desktop Properties. Its not clear to me from reading the other thread whether anything is taking any notice of this file. Should I change this to use the output from WiziWYG?

Sorry I didn't mean this to be so long. I will be enormously indebted to anyone who can help me understand this at all.

Best is to reset these settings in the drivers and let WiziWYG handle the rest in combination with the monitor settings.
You do look at the inner white rectangles? My monitor is at about 80% and then they are barely visible inside the white rectangle. Try to set the monitor to factory defaults first.
D65 is allmost 6500 and for most applications it is more then close enough. If you look at real colour measurement instruments there is a difference between D65 and 6500KYou should use the icc profile created by WiziWYG and you should let WiziWYG load the settings on startupAnd yes on my PC explorer allso shows pictures different, that seems "normal".[/quote]

Let's clear a few points up (sorry to duplicate golfdiesel!):

* Any video card extensions - set these to factory defaults. If you attempt to use the gamma or colour controls in the video card they will certainly result in horrible colour rendition, colour posterisation and the like. You have been warned

* Before you being WiziWYG (or any other calibration), reset the monitor to factory defaults with its on screen menu (or pushing buttons on the screen etc)

* For the purposes that we are talking about, D65 is the same as 6500K.

* You should select gamma 2.2 on WiziWYG. (Only old Macs used 1..

* If you can't find your monitor listed, use one of the "Generic" settings. If your CRT is a Trinitron/Diamondtron then select "Generic Trinitron". How do you know? Open notepad and maximise so most of the screen is white. If you have a Trinitron there will be two very faint horizontal lines running at about 1/3 and 2/3 the way up the screen.

* As far as I know all Photoshops use the monitor profile. The ones that don't have the colour controls (like Elements and the LE versions) assume you are using sRGB colour space.

* In Explorer and the browser the monitor is calibrated, but not profiled. In Photoshop it is both calibrated and profiled - that's why you get the difference. Calibration will, for instance, remove any colour casts (so that green is green, and not greeny-red). A profile-aware application will know that when it wants to display a particular shade of green it knows how to get it displayed. Sometimes there's not much difference between the two, sometimes there is (it depends how close to sRGB the monitor is).

(That last point cooked my head for a good long time and gave me a great deal of misunderstanding for a while!)

You may also find it useful to upgrade to Photoshop Elements - you'll be able to do more things, especially in terms of cleaning up.

Matt