Monitor mayhem.............not for artistic critique!!
Discussion
13 replies
Posted by Andy Astbury on December 1, 2007 at 11:41 AM
All flippin' week I've been trying to calibrate this new Samsung 226CW panel to my old CRT with my Spyder - I've given up
Yesterday Visual Impact lent me an HP1940 so that I could cut the CRT out of the equation - I like it more than the damn Samsung 22"
This is the first image after a monster eyeball calibration session - it looks nearly right this end, but I'm pretty desperate to know if it looks good on the net.
The funny thing I've noticed with the Spyder is that when I've eyeballed my CMS checker and checked the whites against a good image elsewhere, the Spyder always tells me an LCD is too GREEN by miles, a little low on BLUE and the RED is pretty much okay but the kelvin count is way over - so I know it's not telling my the truth!
Just eyeballing it - it looks fine from here Andy.
Do you know anyone else locally who has a different colorimeter? eg a Monaco/Gretag McBeth to see if you get any less grief calibrating.
A couple of thoughts:
- you do have Adobe Gamma disabled don't you...?
- you are calibrating with the monitor as the main monitor and with any 2ndary ones removed/disabled so windows doesn't get confused!
Hi Andy it looks very nice I can even distinguish the slight colour changes on the stem of the mushroom, the stem does appear to have a very slight green/yellow cast at the front going to blue/cyan.
Phillip.
Ps and I found once I switched off all the magic tune magic bright magic everything that it calibrated very easily.
Posted by Barry Southon on December 1, 2007 at 12:12 PM
Looks great on my laptop.
Barry
Posted by Andy Astbury on December 1, 2007 at 12:24 PM
Nick - Adobe Gamma is banished from my system, thank God
Phillip - my spyder2pro gives the same whacky results on the HP panel too.
I've ended up just using the colourimeter to read the displays and then using my nVidea CP's to change the monitors to give me a match to the 'eyeballed' one
I'm seriously thinking of keeping this HP that I was lent yesterday, returning the Samy from whence it came and using the refunded dosh to buy a 22"HP panel - I'll make my mind up Monday morning - perhaps I'll go really stupid and get an HP 2465
Phillip has a good point - you have turned off all the extra color mangling whatzamadoodahs in the monitor menu? - they're meant for watching DVD's and for playing games...make sure everything is set to 'off' and that you're set for a plain vanilla PC 'desktop' screen.
Posted by Andy Astbury on December 1, 2007 at 1:40 PM
Nick - the HP1940 has no fanglewangles in the OSD - just Custom, 9500K and 6500K - it's set to 6500K.
It's hooked to 2 machines via a switcher - one is my network gateway, the other is the machine I do my stills and video edit on.
The second machine has 2x256Mb PCIE cards - one is hooked D-Sub to the HP, the other is hooked to the Samy via DVI.
On the network machine the nVidea CP is set to factory default and most everything looks fine - your Arctic Tern looks nice and punchy, the legs and beak are vivid orange, there's a nice graduated highlight over the front of the birds head, the catch light is there in the eye, and you've hung on to all those menacing highlights under the birds left wing - as I said yesterday - awesome!
If that sounds a fair description of your image from your visual PoV then I'm okay
What I've then done is run the calibration software as far as the colour balance stage, if you are not familiar (wish I wasn't) with spyder software this gives you your rgb outputs, rgb offset in dAb, colour temp and white point.
I've then switched to the other machine, and with the HP selected, run the software again to the same stage, got the same sort of stupid results, then used the nVidea CP in advanced mode to tweak them so the look as identically daft as they did on the other machine
After that then all I've done is open PS on the second machine, proggy opens on the HP, load a suitable jpeg, cleared all the panels out of the way, and kept sliding the image back and forth from the HP to the Samy and calibrated the Samy by eyeball.
I'm a naughty boy 'cos I always work on a 160 grey desktop
Anyway, if the image I posted looks okay then I suppose my wurzel gumage method has worked
Hm, try calibrating without the switchbox in the loop - I gave up on them a year or two back. If your monitor has DV & standard RGB D-type connectors (and you can switch between them on-screen), then I'd go in that direction instead!
You'll still get a bit of a difference between the two systems on a single monitor as the output signals from the two video cards will be different - this usually appears in the brightness area. I'd calibrate for your primary editing system, and then fudge the 2nd one by skipping/ignoring the rgb/brightness/contrast adjustments in the 2ndary system - just go for the colour swatch calibration if you can!
Don't do any adjustments using the graphics card manufacturers software - and don't apply the colour profile using that either - use the windows colour profile window instead.
Would strongly suggest that you try and find someone locally with a Monaco setup...
Posted by Graeme Lee on December 1, 2007 at 3:56 PM
Don't really understand all this calibrating business, so struggled to read all this, so apologies if you've done this but I do know about troubleshooting and you need to eliminate hardware issues first. Get everything out of the equation that can be. Switch, the lot. Also swap cables. Once you've eliminated cable attenuation or crap wiring and the switch isn't an issue, you can go and buy that HP 2465
Good luck, sounds horrendous
Discussion
13 repliesYesterday Visual Impact lent me an HP1940 so that I could cut the CRT out of the equation - I like it more than the damn Samsung 22"
This is the first image after a monster eyeball calibration session - it looks nearly right this end, but I'm pretty desperate to know if it looks good on the net.
The funny thing I've noticed with the Spyder is that when I've eyeballed my CMS checker and checked the whites against a good image elsewhere, the Spyder always tells me an LCD is too GREEN by miles, a little low on BLUE and the RED is pretty much okay but the kelvin count is way over - so I know it's not telling my the truth!
So folks, what's this Agaric look like then
For all I know it could be sky blue and pink
Do you know anyone else locally who has a different colorimeter? eg a Monaco/Gretag McBeth to see if you get any less grief calibrating.
A couple of thoughts:
- you do have Adobe Gamma disabled don't you...?
- you are calibrating with the monitor as the main monitor and with any 2ndary ones removed/disabled so windows doesn't get confused!
Andy
Phillip.
Ps and I found once I switched off all the magic tune magic bright magic everything that it calibrated very easily.
Barry
Phillip - my spyder2pro gives the same whacky results on the HP panel too.
I've ended up just using the colourimeter to read the displays and then using my nVidea CP's to change the monitors to give me a match to the 'eyeballed' one
I'm seriously thinking of keeping this HP that I was lent yesterday, returning the Samy from whence it came and using the refunded dosh to buy a 22"HP panel - I'll make my mind up Monday morning - perhaps I'll go really stupid and get an HP 2465
I can get 12 mixed LCD\CRT monitors matching both visually and final output...
(At least you have found an Agaric...)
Speak soon
Phil
Paula
I hate these new fangled panel thingies
It's hooked to 2 machines via a switcher - one is my network gateway, the other is the machine I do my stills and video edit on.
The second machine has 2x256Mb PCIE cards - one is hooked D-Sub to the HP, the other is hooked to the Samy via DVI.
On the network machine the nVidea CP is set to factory default and most everything looks fine - your Arctic Tern looks nice and punchy, the legs and beak are vivid orange, there's a nice graduated highlight over the front of the birds head, the catch light is there in the eye, and you've hung on to all those menacing highlights under the birds left wing - as I said yesterday - awesome!
If that sounds a fair description of your image from your visual PoV then I'm okay
What I've then done is run the calibration software as far as the colour balance stage, if you are not familiar (wish I wasn't) with spyder software this gives you your rgb outputs, rgb offset in dAb, colour temp and white point.
I've then switched to the other machine, and with the HP selected, run the software again to the same stage, got the same sort of stupid results, then used the nVidea CP in advanced mode to tweak them so the look as identically daft as they did on the other machine
After that then all I've done is open PS on the second machine, proggy opens on the HP, load a suitable jpeg, cleared all the panels out of the way, and kept sliding the image back and forth from the HP to the Samy and calibrated the Samy by eyeball.
I'm a naughty boy 'cos I always work on a 160 grey desktop
Anyway, if the image I posted looks okay then I suppose my wurzel gumage method has worked
But I'm not happy
Thanks for the feedback
You'll still get a bit of a difference between the two systems on a single monitor as the output signals from the two video cards will be different - this usually appears in the brightness area. I'd calibrate for your primary editing system, and then fudge the 2nd one by skipping/ignoring the rgb/brightness/contrast adjustments in the 2ndary system - just go for the colour swatch calibration if you can!
Don't do any adjustments using the graphics card manufacturers software - and don't apply the colour profile using that either - use the windows colour profile window instead.
Would strongly suggest that you try and find someone locally with a Monaco setup...
Good luck, sounds horrendous
oh yeah, good 'shroom