# Calibrated 3 monitors and they all look different. Which one is correct?



## JClishe (Jan 11, 2012)

I have 3 LCD displays on my desktop. They're each different brands and they're each rather inexpensive. Well, one of them was very expensive, but that's because it was purchased in 2004. I recently purchased the X-Rite i1Display 2 and calibrated all 3 displays. They're all much better, but they all still look a little different from each other. Primarily the reds seem to be different shades. So I'm still in the same situation that I was in before I calibrated; I don't know which display to consider correct and use for my editing. 

I've been considering buying an X-Rite ColorChecker chart to create a custom camera calibration in Lightroom. Would I be able to hold the chart up to each of my displays and compare it to the photo of the chart to see which display most accurately represents the real thing? Well, I know I "can" do that, but I'm not certain how accurate that method will be.

Any suggestions?


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## manaheim (Jan 11, 2012)

I'm not familiar with your calibration device, but my spyder handles this stuff very well without much fuss.  That said, there is some skill involved in it and I noticed my monitors got better as I got more practice.

One odd quirk I have noticed is sometimes I wind up finding there are more predictible results when choosing a different base gamma or warmth (cool or warm or whatever)... sometimes this is not what I would expect SHOULD be picked, but it winds up working better anyway.

Mind you, all this is really speaking anecdotally about my experience, but I obviously don't know much about the underpinnings.  You need to get Garbz' attention on this thread.  Dude is the master of technical tidbits like this and could probably help a lot.


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## MLeeK (Jan 11, 2012)

Order prints and decide which screen is best.


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## KmH (Jan 11, 2012)

JClishe said:


> Calibrated 3 monitors and they all look different. Which one is correct?
> 
> I have 3 LCD displays on my desktop. They're each different brands and they're each rather inexpensive.


They are all correct. What type of panels are they/ TN? PVA? IPS?

Being inexpensive, it's very likely all 3 only have a 6-bits color gamut (32 colors per color channel). JPEGs are 8-bits files (256 colors per color channel).

Inexpensive 6-bit displays make up the other 2-bits of color out of thin air.

It is not adviseable to do critical editing on a low gamut display.

I use a dual display setup, but I only use and calibrate one of the displays for editing. My second smaller display is an inexpensive TN panel that only gets used as my desktop, and is where I put all my image editing work panels like Layers, Info, Color picker, Character panel, Adjustment layer panel, masks panel, navigator, mini-Bridge, etc.


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## Josh66 (Jan 11, 2012)

KmH said:


> I use a dual display setup, but I only use and calibrate one of the displays for editing.


Most of the computers at work have dual monitors, and it always drives me crazy when they don't match (they never do).


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## Helen B (Jan 12, 2012)

Does the software you use have a profile verification option? If so you can run it to see which monitor is the closest to being technically correct, and where the inaccuracies lie.

If you use Lightroom and you would like colour accuracy then you may find an improvement if you use a Lightroom profile generated by a ColorChecker Passport (they aren't ICC profiles, but specific profiles for Lightroom). I found an improvement when using the system with a Nikon D3 (using a real ICC profile with a Raw converter that can use ICC profiles is marginally better, but the difference isn't big). You could also use a standard image of a ColorChecker and compare the screen images with the real thing, but remember that a print will probably never match a screen image perfectly because of different colour gamuts and different brightness range. Other issues to be aware of, in addition to those already mentioned by KmH, are inconsistency caused by viewing angle and across the screen. One of the things you pay for with a high-end monitor is consistency across the screen.


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## iresq (Jan 12, 2012)

The one on the left is correct.  (Just a guess, but it's a one in three chance!)


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## cgipson1 (Jan 12, 2012)

MLeeK said:


> Order prints and decide which screen is best.



^^^ This! If you order prints from a really good lab.... the print will be an excellent way to compare your monitors!


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## Big Mike (Jan 12, 2012)

As Keith was saying.  Most monitors can't even display the amount of colors that an 8bit Jpeg can have.  So even if you're 'calibrated', what you see may not be what you're image actually contains.

There are 'wide gamut' displays that are capable of displaying almost as much as AdobeRBG.  If you really want an accurate display, that would be the way to go.  Look up NEC wide gamut display for some options/prices etc.


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## Redeyejedi (Jan 18, 2012)

do i need 2 graphic cards to calibrate and profile two displays connected to one computer?
displays are dell u2410.


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## The_Traveler (Jan 18, 2012)

KmH said:


> JClishe said:
> 
> 
> > Calibrated 3 monitors and they all look different. Which one is correct?
> ...



ditto


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## Garbz (Jan 19, 2012)

There's another element to this not yet mentioned. Sure it would help if all panels weren't crappy TN panels which can't even display 8 bit colour and a correct gamut, but there's more at play here.

Calibration on a multi-montior setup is not very straightforward. Your calibrator only calibrates some part of the display. Calibration ensures that the display has a known white balance, a known tonal curve, and that the colours are consistent across the tonal curve. Calibration does NOT change the primary colours of the display to match a preset value. This is what soft-proofing is for. After the whitebalance and tone is adjusted and verified, calibration software will create an ICC profile for the display. 

Now this is where it becomes a bit not-user-friendly. The profiles are loaded into windows and they just sit there doing nothing. It's up to the software you are using to view the image to load the correct profile out of windows and then adjust the image it is showing (soft proofing) to suit the display correctly. Most software does not do this. Some of the software which does requires manual selection of the profile and thus doesn't support multi-monitor calibration (as each monitor has a different profile). A small subset of programs out there may work correctly. To be perfectly honest I'm not even sure what Photoshop does on a multimonitor setup, but at least you can find out and you'll know which monitor is correct (see below).

With all that said and done, even with perfect software, and a decent display the colours will still not perfectly match unless your display has internal lookup tables (and thus likely costs >$1k). Correction curves for white balance are applied on the video card lookup table. So if you have two screens with the same gamut but different stock white balances then the calibration software will retard one of the colour outputs on the video card to make them match. This has the nasty effect of actually reducing colour gamut and fidelity on that display (no longer have the full 8bit values to work with). 


Anyway what should you do? Identify which profile is being used by your software, then trust that monitor more than anything.

In Photoshop you can do this by going Edit > Colour Settings, click the drop down next to Working Spaces RGB, and see what is listed under (BUT DO NOT SELECT) "Monitor RGB". If your calibration software is like mine it will say the model of your monitor, i.e. Monitor RGB - LCD2690WUXi.


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## JClishe (Jan 19, 2012)

Garbz said:


> Now this is where it becomes a bit not-user-friendly. The profiles are loaded into windows and they just sit there doing nothing. It's up to the software you are using to view the image to load the correct profile out of windows and then adjust the image it is showing (soft proofing) to suit the display correctly. Most software does not do this. Some of the software which does requires manual selection of the profile and thus doesn't support multi-monitor calibration (as each monitor has a different profile). A small subset of programs out there may work correctly. To be perfectly honest I'm not even sure what Photoshop does on a multimonitor setup, but at least you can find out and you'll know which monitor is correct (see below).



I don't understand this comment. Isn't Windows using the ICC profiles? When I login to Windows, I can see all 3 of my monitors switch over to their new profiles within a second or two of logging in; there's a noticeable change from the default profile to the new calibrated profiles. Also, when I launch Windows Color Management, it shows each display as using it's own custom ICC profile that X-Rite created. I don't understand why any software would require manual selection of an ICC profile, when apparently Windows itself is using the new ICC profiles and thus all applications are inherently calibrated.


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## Dao (Jan 19, 2012)

JClishe said:


> Garbz said:
> 
> 
> > Now this is where it becomes a bit not-user-friendly. The profiles are loaded into windows and they just sit there doing nothing. It's up to the software you are using to view the image to load the correct profile out of windows and then adjust the image it is showing (soft proofing) to suit the display correctly. Most software does not do this. Some of the software which does requires manual selection of the profile and thus doesn't support multi-monitor calibration (as each monitor has a different profile). A small subset of programs out there may work correctly. To be perfectly honest I'm not even sure what Photoshop does on a multimonitor setup, but at least you can find out and you'll know which monitor is correct (see below).
> ...




That's what I did for my dual monitor setup (different brand monitors).  Assign each profile to the corresponding monitor in Windows.  The 2 monitors do not look identical, but very close.  If I just use one profile, the other one will be way off.

But I learned that it could be a new feature from Windows 7 allows us to assign the separate profiles to multiple monitor setup.  Those who use older Windows may not have that feature.


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## Garbz (Jan 23, 2012)

JClishe said:


> I don't understand this comment. Isn't Windows using the ICC profiles? When I login to Windows, I can see all 3 of my monitors switch over to their new profiles within a second or two of logging in; there's a noticeable change from the default profile to the new calibrated profiles. Also, when I launch Windows Color Management, it shows each display as using it's own custom ICC profile that X-Rite created. I don't understand why any software would require manual selection of an ICC profile, when apparently Windows itself is using the new ICC profiles and thus all applications are inherently calibrated.



No. Windows does not do colour management. It provides a framework for identifying colour profiles and provides APIs for individual applications to implement colour correction but it does none itself. What you are seeing is a program (most likely from the manufacturer of your calibrator, or something generic like the Adobe Gamma Loader), that runs on startup, looks at the colour profiles in windows, and applies a matching set of correction curves to the video card. This is only part of the problem. As I mentioned this correction is only part of the monitor calibration. It ensures that your screens are consistent in tone and white balance but it does NOT ensure they display the correct colour. 

Windows Colour Management provides a framework for software to quiz windows what colour settings to apply to devices. That is it. Nothing more. It's up to the software to identify the colour profiles and then apply correction curves as appropriate. Some apps like Adobe Photoshop / Lightroom get this info from windows, other apps like Mozilla Firefox and Irfan view ask you to manually select the colour profile as it doesn't even bother with the quizzing windows part. And this is exactly why when you have a wide gamut monitor it becomes important to select your applications wisely or you end up with this, 10 points to who can guess which image is colour correct, the left or the right:






In my world where I use a wide gamut monitor, despite being calibrated with a proper hardware lookup table, ICC profiles loaded in windows, most applications will display images too saturated because they aren't colour managed. Windows Colour Management is really dumb 



Dao said:


> That's what I did for my dual monitor setup (different brand monitors).  Assign each profile to the corresponding monitor in Windows.  The 2 monitors do not look identical, but very close.  If I just use one profile, the other one will be way off.
> 
> But I learned that it could be a new feature from Windows 7 allows us to assign the separate profiles to multiple monitor setup.  Those who use older Windows may not have that feature.



Yes it is. But does the software load both profiles, or just one? Actually I'm not even sure a program is capable of identifying on which screen it is currently on, except to identify it as a primary or secondary... which wouldn't work on a cloned setup... hmmm now I want to do experiments but I only have one screen.


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## JClishe (Jan 23, 2012)

This is good stuff, Garbz. Thanks for taking the time to write this up.


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## The_Traveler (Jan 23, 2012)

I pursued this a year or so ago and was told that the video card must explicitly support two separate color profiles running simultaneously. I have no clue whether this was an attempt to upsell me to a new video card or whether it was the actual truth.


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