monitor calibration adventures

[dbur]

Hi,

After developing a couple thousand images in LR I started thinking I should use a calibrated monitor if I want my result to be consistent and accurate. I got a Spyder4pro and calibrated 3 monitors so far, all with consistent results.

The only problem is I don't like the results. My images are duller and have an apparent bluish tinge.

My assumption was this is caused because I have developed these images with an improperly calibrated monitor and have to do them all over, except that even windows apps with white backgrounds now appear duller and blue tinged.

My previous calibration was to use some user interactive programs that put up various images and ask to make adjustments to achieve proper results such as in the Win7 built in calibration utility.

So I then tried to re-develop some images with my new 'properly' calibrated monitor profiles, but I have not been able to get the results to be as pleasing as they were. I also notice I am applying more aggressive adjustments to try and get the images looking their best, which seems to indicate the calibration is off from optimal.

I searched and download a selection of supposedly properly adjusted test images and I think I see the same result as with my images. Duller and bluish tinged.

Since 3 monitors all calibrate with the same result I assume the calibration is working as expected. But why are my results worse? I'm aware much of this is subjective and am beginning to think the calibration standard for consistency is not a calibration that gives the best viewing experience on a good monitor, which may be capable of displaying a better image with settings other than what it calibrates to. Am I full of crap?

So I have a couple dilemmas:

1. How do I reconcile that my images don't look as good to me as they used to?

2. If this is where I need to be, how do I update the developing in all my thousands of images to be more optimized with the calibrated monitor? Is it feasible to just apply an automatic adjustment that does x% increase in brightness, y% increase in contrast, z deg increase in white balance color temperature, etc.? If I can automatically do this processing to all my images, how do I do it? Applying a preset in LR overwrites previous values rather than increasing by some%. I know someone could write a plugin to do it, but I'm not equipped to do that myself.

Any advise or comments?

Thanks.

[stamper]

I noticed recently that after calibrating my monitors with Spyder Express 4 that one of them had a greenish tinge. During the calibrating I had a light on. I then did the calibrating in near darkness and the tinge was gone and everything was OK.

[Jack Hogan]

Hi dbur,

One calibrates/profiles because one would like to ensure that other people viewing one's image on their calibrated/profiled output medium see something very similar.  High quality monitors properly setup, caibrated and profiled should not degrade perceived IQ.  The same is not necessarily true of low quality monitors such as ones sometimes used in laptops.

So assuming that you are using properly setup high-quality monitors the issue may simply be that if you are used to coffee with lots of sugar it may take you a while to get used to coffee without sugar - although once you are used to coffee without sugar you may be in a better position to appreciate the quality of the brew you are drinking and compare notes with other coffee connoisseurs

So the first two questions are what specific monitors are you trying to calibrate/profile and do you understand the difference between calibration and profiling?

Jack

[dbur]

The monitors I want to work the best are HP LP2475W's.  (IPS).

I had thought about whether the problem was I am used to too much sugar but haven't come to a conclusion yet.

I thought I had studied it enough to understand calibration and color profile management, but I suppose I could be wrong.

David B

[PhotoEcosse]

As Jack suggests, you can use Lightroom to "adjust" an image to look "right" on an incorrectly calibrated monitor. But it won't look the same when viewed by someone else on a properly calibrated monitor.

Assuming that you are using a decent quality camera to shoot Raw in fairly neutral light conditions, then the default import settings of Lightroom should produce an image reasonably close to the "correct" colours. If you routinely find that you have to adjust (especially Colour Temperature or Tint) your images, then that would suggest either a camera fault or incorrect monitor calibration.

SpyderPro4 should automatically take your ambient light conditions into account when profiling your screen.

[Simon Garrett]

I also use HP LP2475W.  A couple of points to note: this monitor takes quite a long time for the light output to stabilise - perhaps 30 minutes.  This is a longer time than other monitors I've got.  Don't calibrate/profile until the monitor has been on at least that time, preferably an hour. 

The other (generic) point: if you want prints to look anything like the screen, you need the brightness around 100cm/m2.  The HP at default brightness is much, much brighter than this.  I have the HP monitor brightness set at somewhere around 25 (on a scale of 100) to get the right brightness. 

The HP LP2475w is wide-gamut - a bit wider than Adobe RGB.  This is good for most purposes, but as you may have found, colours will be way out (generally over-saturated) unless you profile and calibrate with a hardware tool, and use colour-managed software all the time.  In other words, a fully colour-managed workflow.  That means using LR, PS or similar to edit, and if you want colours on the web to look right, you need to use a colour managed browser.  The only colour managed browsers are Firefox and Safari.  Neither IE (even the latest) nor Chrome are fully colour-managed (unless they've changed in the last month - since I last checked).  Even Firefox and Safari have issues with colour management: for example, both use the profile for the main monitor only, so if you have two dissimilar monitors, only the main monitor is properly colour managed.  The Windows 7/8 photo viewer is colour managed, the XP equivalent (called something like "picture and FAX viewer", as I recall) isn't.  The Windows desktop isn't colour managed, so desktop colours are a bit gaudy on a wide-gamut monitor.

[dbur]

The monitors were well warmed up.  I shoot mostly with a Canon 50D in raw and process in LR4.4 with auto white balance to start.  Mostly the WB is about right but sometimes I tweak it some depending on the image content.

I mostly want to get the best on-monitor viewing experience and also have it consistent with other correctly calibrated monitors and color managed web browsers.  The low brightness settings suggested seem inferior to me, though at some point I will probably want to be able to print and get what I expect as well.

I use FF and it seems to get the color profiles right in all cases except for tag only images that are not sRGB.  BTW, my FF browser (23.0.1) seems to correctly manage color profiles for both the primary and secondary displays.

http://www.gballard.net/psd/go_live_page_profile/embeddedJPEGprofiles.html

[kaelaria]

This is an impossible topic to answer without being in front of the monitor.  There are LOTS of ways to screw up calibration, even though all three may be the same doesn't mean they are right.  How about posting some images before and after for all of us to see, so we can tell which track looks more correct.

[dbur]

After thinking about how to post a picture that could be expected to show you what I see I think I have to abandon that.  Any screen capture I do is just going to present on your monitor according to your color profile, not mine.  At best it would show a relative difference -if I adjusted two images under the same profile to reflect what I think I am seeing.   I think what you said about being in front of the monitor is true.

I attached two snipped samples from LR with the new calibrated color profile.  Before = edited under previous color profile  and after = adjusted closer to how I thought it looked with the old profile.  It looks like the snipper reproduced the images here as I see them in LR.  (If your browser interprets untagged images as sRGB)

I did try adjusting a variety of images in the new profile to be more to my liking .  This is what seems to get close in LR4.4, 2012 process:

brightness:  +~.25, almost the same adjustment needed for all the images I tried.
temperature:  +~100 on about 1/4 of the images.
contrast: +18 on one image.

Brightness is the most significant adjustment correction, and I think my perception of a blue tinge may mostly have to do with the brightness, though a tiny bit of temperature shift also seems right sometimes.

I can apply these to all images at once using the library quick develop, except the minimum exposure adj there is 1/3 stop and I would like just 1/4.  Now I'm getting nit picky.  How can I apply 1/4 stop exposure adjustment to a mess of images?

Really though, the more I look at these the more I realize the differences are pretty small.

If you are viewing these with a color profile intelligent browser and a calibrated monitor profile what do they look like to you?

Thanks.

[Jack Hogan]

Hi dbur,

Nothing wrong with your before and after in my view, so perhaps it is simply the fact that you were used to different default brightness and contrast.  You can still adjust your images to look how you like them - confident that now other people looking at them on their color managed systems will see approximately the same thing (before they didn't).  Getting prints to look like your monitor is a whole other chapter.

Two additional comments about color balance.  Unless we are talking about critical mixed light situations, I would not use LR auto as the standard bearer.  And calibration.  I am not sure how the Spyder4 software works, but it is better to get the monitor set up as close as possible to your desired target color balance and brightness in hardware (i.e. "Calibration" through the buttons on the monitor itself), rather then let the software make all those macro changes through your video LUT ("Profiling").  One may give up quite a bit of tonal/color range through a skimpy 8-bit LUT if one is not careful.  I find opensource/free argyll and dispcalgui (youi need both) to be a bit cumbersome to setup and much slower than commercial products, but they give the best results in town.  Link to simple tutorial.

Jack

[D Fosse]

If you take a screenshot and assign the monitor profile to it in Photoshop it will be a correct representation of what you see on screen. Then convert to sRGB for posting.

What's your OS? Without calibration, Windows will set sRGB as default monitor profile. As already mentioned, the LP2475W is wide gamut, so that results in oversaturation (which you then got used to and assumed was normal).

With a valid monitor profile, however, the (extended) position of the three primaries will be accounted for and compensated for in the profile. So now it looks "dull" in comparison.

As I (and others) have said before, wide gamut monitors should come with a huge printed warning in red bold letters: the monitor must be calibrated and profiled, and used only with fully color managed software.

[dbur]

Hi,

My OS is Win7 64bit.  I was pretty sure snips would default to be sRGB and default to be shown as sRGB on everyone using FF browser so I skipped the step of explicitly making sure it was in the metadata after verifying that in the browser.  (Sorry if you don't use FF) 

I don't believe displaying sRGB on my wide gamut display was causing a problem since saturation hasn't changed after profiling.  I'm becoming comfortable with the belief that the only real significant change compared to my manual cal was in brightness.  I've always used proPhotoRGB in LR and other tools that support it.  Win7 seems to have been displaying correctly for those apps.  I try to only go to sRGB for jpg exports.  Even hugin and zerene stacker have worked fine for me if I ignore the color presentation and re-assign ProPhotoRGB to the tiff outputs again.  (They don't manipulate color)

Thanks for the pointer to dispcalGUI.  I'll download those and when I have some time try them out.  You think they give better results than the Spyder4 SW?

The Syder SW was pretty straight forward.  It was irritating my monitor wants to put the controls right in the center so I have to move the Spyder to make each brightness adjustment, but I guess there's no SW fix for that.

My monitor 1 on this system is an LG L227WTG, which is also advertized as wide gamut, but the Spyder did not automatically detect this model and then warned that it's measurements indicated the monitor is not wide gamut.  I tried it with both wide gamut and normal settings and the result looks similar, but are still off compared to the LP2475W  (reds look a little bit orange).  Anyway I don't care too much about the best color accuracy on that monitor, but I wonder why it's not getting my reds right.

I set the monitors to the factory defaults as requested by Spyder, which was 6500K for all of the monitors.  I felt odd it asked for lower brightness than I am used to and you are all recommending, but you are right that I may be used to my previous manual calibration and have done my developing in that environment.

Adjusting the monitor directly, before allowing the Spyder to calibrate, is something I'm not yet sure how to do for best effect, unless it's just following a SW guided cal procedure such as Win7's built in tool or adobe Gamma.  This is how I did it before the Spyder, and ended up with higher than recommended brightness settings.  Spyder complained about adobe gamma being enabled so I have turned it off.

Thanks for the comments you all have given.  I think I'm making progress on this topic.

[Jack Hogan]

Thanks for the pointer to dispcalGUI.  I'll download those and when I have some time try them out.  You think they give better results than the Spyder4 SW?

It did compared to the software that came with my Spyder3.  But it is slower (overnight) and more cumbersome to set up.

I set the monitors to the factory defaults as requested by Spyder, which was 6500K for all of the monitors.

The software should be able to measure color temperature and let you fine tune it through the monitor's controls (usually through gain and offsets in advanced menus).  Does it?

Adjusting the monitor directly, before allowing the Spyder to calibrate, is something I'm not yet sure how to do for best effect, unless it's just following a SW guided cal procedure such as Win7's built in tool or adobe Gamma.

No, adobe Gamma is a very rough and unreliable tool, and you should definitely disable it now that you have proper hardware/software.  You typically adjust macro variables such as brightness, contrast and color temperature directly on the monitor (what some refer to as calibration - see the screenshots in the tutorial I linked to earlier).  Contrast is typically best set somewhere someone was able to get a good calibration/profile - and left there ( I notice that tftcentral used 65 for your HP and 50 for the LG so you may want to try those).  The software should help you fine tune brightness and color temperature with monitor controls based on your viewing environment.  Then it should take over and 'profile' your monitor, generating a 1 for 1 correction table/formula to bring its output as close to the standard as possible.  The correction should be slight and gradual.  If it isn't, there is probably something wrong.

Cheers,
Jack

[dbur]

The spyder4Pro SW asked what controls there were (brightness, contrast, gamma), but then only had me set to factory defaults and then adjust brightness in the procedure.

[mouse]

The Syder SW was pretty straight forward.  It was irritating my monitor wants to put the controls right in the center so I have to move the Spyder to make each brightness adjustment, but I guess there's no SW fix for that.

There is a hardware fix on your HP-LP2475w.  Open the on screen menu.  Go to OSD Control.  Move the OSM where you wish.

Cheers.

[dbur]

Hey thanks!  I never even thought to look for something like that.