HELP! Monitor profile

[Hening Bettermann]

When I open an image on my Eizo CG243W, I looks like shot in fog if I choose a profile with gamma 1.8 or 2.2 or L*. Only gamma 1 looks normal. If I take screen shots to include for demonstration here, they look all alike = normal!
It is the same with freshly made or older profiles (which have worked normal earlier), and the same under Mountain Lion and Snow Leopard, the same if the Eizo is the secondary (normal) or primary screen.
I have recently installed a Windows partition via Bootcamp on the disk that also contains Snow Leopard, but Mountain Lion is on a disk of its own, albeit on the same computer, a Mac Pro early 2009.
I have not earlier had a profile with gamma 1.0, just made this one recently for the sake of comparison and experiment, so it can not be because I always have used a gamma 1.0 profile and just not been aware of it.
What is going on here???

[Phil Indeblanc]

I think the Gamma at somepoint was changed in Win7 from 1.8 for previous Win versions to 2.2.
There was some change to OS and I can't remember.

But that may not be what you encounter.

What are you using to profile your Eizo ?

[Hening Bettermann]

Thank you, Phil.
The Eizo is calibrated with a Spyder3 Elite and the ColorNavigator software.
I sort of think that the gamma is applied twice. But why, how and where?
What puzzles me the most is that the screen shots are normal!
Merry Christmas anyway!

[Phil Indeblanc]

AFAIK, The Spyder3 will not calibrate the LUT of your screen.
It will calibrate the video cards output by "compensation" to the screen settings and adjustments you make.
(If it does/did, this solves my problem with my screen :-)

But I'm not too clear on what you mean by the screen shots being normal.  When you do a "PrintScreen" it will still snap the information, not what is projected. If you monitor was OFF, it would still get the info.

Merry Christmas Hening.

[D Fosse]

In a color managed environment, gamma is remapped from document space to monitor space. You don't "see" gamma, the visual result on screen should be linear whatever the calibration gamma target. You just want to stay close to native to not force the behavior of the display too much.

This has to be related to the video card/driver, I cannot imagine anything in Colornavigator that could possibly cause this. I've never heard of anything like it. Does it happen in all applications, color managed as well as not?

The Spyder sensor is fully supported in Colornavigator, the same way as almost any other sensor on the market, so that's not the problem.

[Hening Bettermann]

Thank you for chiming in, D Fosse.

In the meantime, I have figured out: The Spyder3 ist supported, BUT
"Ambient light adjustment and gray balance prioritizing function are not available." (http://www.eizoglobal.com/products/coloredge/cn/index.html#anchor03) !
And after I created 1 new profile with Contrast priority, everything seems fine - also the earlier created profiles with Gray Balance priority...

> You don't "see" gamma, the visual result on screen should be linear whatever the calibration gamma target.

Hm...Now the gamma 1 profile looks dark, as exspected.

But Christmas looks brighter with this problem solved!

[Simon Garrett]

The purpose of applying a Tone Response Curve (gamma) is (these days) primarily to optimise the encoding for 8-bit coding spaces like jpeg.  It's also used for histograms to get a perceptually-uniform histogram.  Historically, it was also used to compensate for the characteristics of CRT monitors.  

However, as D Fosse says, the end-to-end TRC of the system (from camera to monitor) is linear.  It must be, or what you see on the screen won't look like the original scene.  A colour-managed system is designed to ensure this - linear end-to-end TRC.  So if you alter the gamma in the monitor calibration, a colour-managed program should merely compensate for this in it's software, so you don't see any change!  That's what colour management does.  

When you use non colour managed software then a problem arises that most image files have a TRC applied - typically a gamma of 2.2 (sRGB is slightly different but similar).  Without colour management, that TRC won't get removed.  However if your monitor has a gamma of 2.2 (actually, the inverse of that) then it compensates without colour management.  But if you alter monitor gamma, non colour managed software will display differently.  

I hope that makes sense.

[D Fosse]

Yes, that's well summed up. Monitor gamma matters only outside color management, if the TRC of the monitor doesn't match the (inverse) gamma encoding in the file.

I don't think the gray balance priority in Colornavigator has anything to do with it. That's just unavailable if black point is set to minimum; it becomes an option if you lift black point enough for the three components to match (with my CG246 and CX240 a black point of 0.3 is required).

Could it be that the ambient compensation went overboard? I never use that so I don't know. (Edit - there's no ambient light compensation in Colornavigator, but on newer monitors there is an EcoView function in the monitor that could do the same thing if enabled).

[D Fosse]

One thing. You must disable the Spyder software from startup, or it will apply video card corrections in addition to the monitor LUT in the CG.

[Hening Bettermann]

Thanks Simon for clarifying. Yes it does make sense.
Gray balance: In CN 6, the choice of gray balance is available in the sense that I could tick the radio button, and that was with the minimum black point of 0.2 cd. The fact is however that the new profiles (with contrast priority) work - post hoc or propter hoc...
Ambient light: The ambient light was almost dark, and I had covered the monitor with my black raincoat.
Spyder software: is not installed.
Thank you all for sharing your knowledge.

[brntoki]

I don't think Eco View can be enabled if your monitor is set to the CAL setting (mine can't anyway), and therefore without the hardware calibrated settings (unless those exact settings can be transferred over to a monitor preset).