Monitor Colours help

[michaelb104]

Not really sure how to explain this one, but here is a bit of history.  A couple of months ago on my home PC I was running Vista and PSE7 and my on screen photo's and printed photo's were a good enough match for me to be happy. 

I have since upgraded to Windows7 and PSE8 and what I saw on screen and what printed were completely different but after a lot of tweaking and reinstalls I've got to a stage where I'm getting similar colours but no where near as good as before - OK I'll accept that but not happy

Right back to the present day, a couple of weeks ago I took a photo of a sunset over a river as an entry to the weekend comp on the site (PR) that shouldn't be mentioned here  
On my home PC the colours in the sky and the reflections on the river are really a bright golden colour.  So last weekend I thought I'd print it out to see what it looked like, what a disappointment, there was no golden colour just a sort of reddish tinge to the bright bits and grey clouds.  Ah well I thought the printer does not do gold - the printer is a Canon Pixma IP4600 by the way.

Well a couple of nights ago messing about with the OH's netbook I went to my Flickr account and there is the photo with the reddish tinge and grey clouds, just like the printed copy, so I've since had a look at it on my work laptop and it's the same.

So now I'm thinking maybe it's not the printer at all it's what's being displayed on the monitor......but I do have a Spyder 3 and I last calibrated about 3 weeks ago.

Any ideas/help greatly appreciated



Sorry for the ramble.

Mike.

[Forseti]

I had a similar problem yesterday whilst playing around with LR3beta and seeing how it would print. For a start, the images looked awful on the monitor but this awfulness was also reproduced on the print. Right then, back to square one I thought to myself and then proceeded to do another monitor calibration. It has to be said though that I'd only done a calibration a few days before. Now I know nothing about your device having an EyeOne2 but it may well be the same. The recommendation is to use the monitors native white point but I calibrated it another way this time setting a white point of 6500 manually. Now I have no idea of what the monitors native white point is but in setting it manually in the next stage of the calibration all the RGB settings were all over the place with red being off the scale. Over saturated reds was also the main problem with the print. Anyway, to cut a long story short, having manually set a white point of 6500, gamma at 2.2 and luminance at 120 on completion of the calibration process it was like looking at a completely different monitor. Now this can't be right I thought, the screen is far too dull and appears a grey like colour. Of course this was basically down to the fact that my monitor was so badly calibrated on previous occasions that I'd simply got used to it and the change took a couple of hours to get used to. The end result though is that a subsequent print now matches exactly what I see on the monitor and is much more pleasing. So in your case it could be (a) a corrupt monitor profile in which case you'll be best doing it all over again or, (b) your device is using (or has been set) to use the monitors native white point in which case see can you change it manually to 6500 (daylight), a gamma of 2.2 and luminance of 120 with the subsequent RGB channels centred.

[Hinfrance]

Is your system actually using the calibrated ICM profile? Have you checked to see that PSE8 is using sRGB? If you've got it set to Adobe RGB you could be in for a world of pain when you move the images outside of an Adobe environment.

[Oldboy]

Agree with Tringle. Just make sure the profile is been loaded into your graphics card. 

[michaelb104]

All,

Thanks for the responses, I'll go away check/try and report back.

Mike.

[michaelb104]

Well I've checked the ICM profile and recalibrated the monitor, I've also changed the ICM profile that the printer was using in PSE.  Now when I print things are nearly back to what they were before the upgrade 

I've still got the itching question that is, what I'm seeing my photo's like is it anywhere near what you are seeing my photo's like when I post them, I guess that is impossible to answer though.

Thanks again for the help.

Mike.

[Forseti]

I've still got the itching question that is, what I'm seeing my photo's like is it anywhere near what you are seeing my photo's like when I post them, I guess that is impossible to answer though.

Well if we all calibrate and profile our monitors (which of course not all do), and we upload images in the sRGB colour space (which the web uses) then yes we should do.

[Hinfrance]

I've still got the itching question that is, what I'm seeing my photo's like is it anywhere near what you are seeing my photo's like when I post them, I guess that is impossible to answer though.

Well if we all calibrate and profile our monitors (which of course not all do), and we upload images in the sRGB colour space (which the web uses) then yes we should do.

It's not just the web that uses sRGB Forseti (and that's not strictly true, Safari at least recognises the colour space of uploaded images a attempts to display them properly), it's likely to be almost every monitor that the images are view on. Monitors that can display wider a wider gamut are few and far between and so expensive that even OldBoy has probably only got a couple of them. 

[Oly Paul]

I've still got the itching question that is, what I'm seeing my photo's like is it anywhere near what you are seeing my photo's like when I post them, I guess that is impossible to answer though.

Thanks again for the help.

Mike.

Unless we are all using the same monitor that has been calibrated the same then the answer is no, the reasons for this are..

1-Contrary to popular belief the world wide web does not have a colour space and is rgb and not srgb.

2-The majority of web browsers are not colour managed.

What this means is that unless your images are using a embedded profile and the veiwer is using a good colour management aware browser (highly unlikely) then your images are being viewed in the monitors native colour space and not srgb and no two monitors (even identical ones display the same) .

This means that individual monitors  depending on quality can display colours to varying extents that exceed the minimum srgb space, so without a colour managed browser and a embedded srgb colour space in the image to dumb those monitor colours down to the srgb space then we are all seeing slightly different versions of colour depending on the quality of the monitor and calibration.

[michaelb104]

Thanks again for the information, I really should investigate this more.

[Oly Paul]

Monitors that can display wider a wider gamut are few and far between and so expensive that even OldBoy has probably only got a couple of them.  

As the s-RGB color space was created cooperatively by HP and Microsoft in 1996 as a dumbed down bog standard space for use on the cheapest monitors and printers,  I think we can assume that monitor advancment as moved on in the last 14 years, even my  £200 LG monitor displays more colours than the s-RGB colour space!  

[Hinfrance]

sRGB is based on HDTV standard, has the same number of colours (although a compressed gamut) as aRGB, and will probably see us through for a few years yet.

The cheapest aRGB monitor I could find after a few minutes googling was just shy of $3000.

If you are editing using aRGB and a standard monitor then you are probably editing colours you cannot see.

Inkjet printers use a CMYK colour space. RGB colour spaces are additive, CMYK are subtractive.

As an aside while I was reading up on this again - very interesting - I discovered why I can usually tell who has a Mac by how dark the pictures are on the web. It appears that Macs have a monitor gamma of 1.8 by default whereas everything else (really) uses a gamma of 2.2. As the gamma describes the slope and extent of dark through light then pictures created on Macs will appear dark to everyone else. Conversely this would explain why Andrew sees my pictures as lighter than intended - it cuts both ways.

So Mac guys, set your monitor gammas to 2.2 and temperature to 6500, recalibrate and join the rest of the world.  

[Oly Paul]

True but I managed to find one at £2000, but it is a 42" screen 
http://www.jvc.co.uk/site/lt-42wx70/page1.html

[Hinfrance]

True but I managed to find one at £2000, but it is a 42" screen 
http://www.jvc.co.uk/site/lt-42wx70/page1.html

What big eyes you have . . that actually doesn't sound like a bad deal. Shame I haven't got a 42" desk