Building a colour profile for a digital picture frame

[littlemapper]

Hi, I'm new here. I've been trying to load photos into my parent's digital picture frame, but am finding the colours and contrast to be less than satisfactory (whites are all washed out and tones are really cold). Since there aren't any controls on the picture frame, I was wondering if it would be possible to build a custom profile for the picture frame manually and then to apply this in the GIMP so that the processed photos display with better colour on the digital picture frame?

Any suggestions would be welcome.

[howardm]

before you go to that level of work, have you asked yourself 'will my parents care?'  If they're not photo geeks like us (like 99% of the population), they won't care as long as the pictures are good and evoke memories.

Other than that, I suppose you could take a frame of a colorchecker, load it into the frame and then reshoot it and generate a profile.

[Wayne Fox]

Maybe get them a better one?  I assume the images are converted to standard sRGB which would look good on the web.  Most of them do a decent job of presenting these type of images ... I've seen a few cheap ones which look bad no matter what you do, but there are plenty that do OK that aren't that expensive.

[littlemapper]

before you go to that level of work, have you asked yourself 'will my parents care?'  If they're not photo geeks like us (like 99% of the population), they won't care as long as the pictures are good and evoke memories.

Other than that, I suppose you could take a frame of a colorchecker, load it into the frame and then reshoot it and generate a profile.

Good point. I don't know. But it's nice to make the most of what I already have.

Are there any freeware tools available to experiment with? Perhaps Argyll? Could I treat the Digital Photo Frame as a "printer"? In that case, I would generate the test target, transfer it to the frame, display it and then photograph it. Then hopefully Argyll could generate an ICC profile which I can then apply to all photos either via GIMP or some command line tool?

[littlemapper]

Maybe get them a better one?  I assume the images are converted to standard sRGB which would look good on the web.  Most of them do a decent job of presenting these type of images ... I've seen a few cheap ones which look bad no matter what you do, but there are plenty that do OK that aren't that expensive.

I just bought it for my dad as a gift. Should have done some research. It's a Samsung. Not wanting to waste it.

[digitaldog]

If whatever drives this picture frame isn’t ICC aware (and I doubt it is) , the profile will do no good. You might as well just apply some edit to the images to adjust for the ugly appearance (an adjustment layer, flatten), then throw them on the product.

[louoates]

I doubt any of those low cost competitive units will display true colors as we're used to working with. And I wonder if the unit may be trying to convert to srgb by itself and just isn't up to the task. 
The "washed out" look may also be because the brightness control default, if any, is too high. Just like the brightness of demos in the TV stores are jacked up to compete with the ambient store lighting.

But once you see what's wrong with that specific screen you should be able to make a simple Photoshop action/droplet to correct lots of images at once. You might try the auto color correction in Photoshop first as I believe it will determine a better white point or at least a more "standard" one. Next I'd increase the contrast and saturation plus add sharpening before converting to srgb. Let us know how you do.

[littlemapper]

If whatever drives this picture frame isn’t ICC aware (and I doubt it is) , the profile will do no good. You might as well just apply some edit to the images to adjust for the ugly appearance (an adjustment layer, flatten), then throw them on the product.

Yes. The intention was not to load the ICC into the digital photo frame, but to "pre-distort" the RGB image JPG before loading it into the picture frame :-). So I develop the images as usual, apply the pre-distortion filter, and then transfer to the photo frame. At least that's the idea.