# Screen Calibration



## Overread (Nov 1, 2008)

*dreaded repeat thread fool appears*

Ok so I got the Spyder 3 elite and have already installed and plugged all the bits in. I then ran its calibration function. Now things look very different - a greeny colour cast from my past is gone, but there is a new colour cast on the screen - clearly visable as I surve the net (sort of very pale purply). I am surfing in internet explorer and I am just wondering if this change is normal (ie windows is bad at displaying in true colours)

Also on the expert tab there is measured mode for black and white luminance with preset values - are these the best to stay with or are there others to consider.
I should point out that I have no printer access to test with - I will also get round to editing and posting a sample photos with the calibrated screen.


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## tasman (Nov 1, 2008)

Did you turn off all of the lights in the room and close any window blind casting any light on the monitor? The best way to test the calibration is to do a print out to check the colors.


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## kundalini (Nov 1, 2008)

Also make sure your monitor has had plenty on time to warm up.


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## manaheim (Nov 1, 2008)

Also what kind of panel you have may have had some effect.  A lot of these cheap panels are a nightmare to get right... I actually found that with the panel I have that I have to tell it I wanted WARM colors for the test to work properly... totally not the case.  Stupid cheap panels.

My software is WAY older than yours, but I also noticed that there was a couple sections in the process where I didn't entirely understand what it was asking me to do and I really messed up on the first couple tries.  (there is one section where you adjust the RGB on the monitor so it all falls within X of each other... I totally skipped this the first time assuming that the correction would adjust for the variance.)  whoops. 

Hope this helps.


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## Overread (Nov 1, 2008)

Ok been playing with this all day so far and getting very lost. So far I can calibrate the screen with the spyder to print standard target with no problem - but when I try for sRGB settings I keep getting a problem whereby it wants brightness at 0.80 and yet on the highest brightness setting of my screen I can only reach a reading of 0.44

I have not got adobe gammer running (I don't even have it) and I have also rest my nvida control panel to default settings to no avail


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## manaheim (Nov 1, 2008)

Did you reset your monitor to its default settings before you began the process?  And have you tried calling Spyder tech support?


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## Overread (Nov 1, 2008)

yes moniter reset and I tried lowering the contrast and brightness manually to 0 to start with,but I still get an error where I can't meet its requirement - upon canceling I get this message:

The calibrated "white luminance of the display is too high - your adjustments did not achieve the desired target value. The calibrated value is 226.0 and the target value is 80.0"

I can lower the clibrated value to 99.6 by reduding brightness and contrast to 0 before running the calibration test, but no more - it still wants 0.80 and I still cannot get past 0.44.


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## manaheim (Nov 1, 2008)

Weird.  I would definitely call spyder.


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## Hertz van Rental (Nov 1, 2008)

Have you tried searching the FAQ's on Spyder's site?

http://spyder.datacolor.com/


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## Overread (Nov 1, 2008)

had a look Hertz, but they have little on the FAQ - certainly nothing that really sounds like my problem
thanks


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## Hertz van Rental (Nov 1, 2008)

I got a similar message on my Mac and I turned the 'brightness' down on the LCD screen and seemed to sort it.
Is your monitor a flat LCD or is it a CRT?


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## Overread (Nov 1, 2008)

LCD - a Hanns G  HX191D  to be specific
Thing is I did try lowering the brightness and contrast manually as well to 0 before running the calibration - I even set those values to 0 in the Nvida control panel - and it did lower the result - but only to 99.6. (according to the error report when I canceled after the below defeated me)
And when calibrating I still cannot boost brightness past 0.44 to reach 0.80


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## Garbz (Nov 2, 2008)

Ok Hanns G HX191D is a TN film panel, so yes it could be somewhat of a nightmare to get right because like all TN film panels the brightness and colour changes with viewing angle.

I have to ask are we talking foot Luminens (fL) here? Or candela per sq m (cd/m^2) ? Even my screen can't get down to 80cd/m^2 without adjusting the contrast, which is very bad given that the contrast of an LCD monitor should remain set at 50% all the time. Also the brightness of the dark parts are related to the brightness of the light parts in what is called the contrast ratio.

sRGB and AdobeRGB calibration targets typically specify a brightness and contrast ratio to work with, but it sounds very strange to me that the software complains about one of the settings. Typically the brightness is adjusted to meet the right white point, and then the black levels are calibrated in software, or adjusted using the "black level" control which behaves in a similar way to the contrast control.

I would suggest this. Ignore the sRGB calibration target. It makes no sense to calibrate the light and dark point of the monitors if you aren't in a 100% controlled environment too (64lux at D50 colour temperature), and not all setups are capable of this either.

The ones you should really be paying attention to are the white point (should be D65 or close to 6500K), the response curve (sRGB curve, not Gamma curve, they are different), and then the calibration should take care of greyscale colour tracking behind the scenes automatically.

Also what kind of software are you using? Does your software spit out the final calibration information? Colour temperature, white point, black point, average DeltaE values, correction curves. Maybe take a screen shot and paste it here. 

Finally if you're comparing your before and afters straight away you will perceive a colour shift. That is when I calibrate my screen to D50 it looks very very orange for the first 3 minutes, but then when I switch it to D65 it now looks blue. Did you give your eyes time to adjust? Unless you're outside or you have a controlled lighting environment your screen once calibrated with a D65 white point should appear to to have a slight blue cast compared to halogen / incandescent lighting, and a purple cast compared to fluros.


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## Overread (Nov 2, 2008)

Candela per sq m here.

these are the setting that it wants for sRGB 
measured
black luminance - 0.80 (adjust brightness)
white luminance - 80.0 (adjust contrast)


I am currently calibrated on 6500k and gamma 2.2 - however you have lost me with the curves details. I can go into an advanced mode for target settings which lets me set either a custom curve, a cineon or a linear greyscale curve.
and this is the calibration data I get after calibrating (set to 6500k and 2.2 gamma - white and black not measured mode)


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## Alex_B (Nov 2, 2008)

keep in mind that your brain might have gotten used to your original colour cast, so now, after proper calibration, you subjectively feel a colour cast in the other direction. give your brain a few weeks.

just an idea


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## Overread (Nov 2, 2008)

my brain is dead I think 
but yes it is more used to the calibrated view than the old veiw (which has a very strong greeny hue now I compare the two) the newer view does have the slight tinge to it - sort of bluey purply I think (I mostly notice it in IE7 though)


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## Alex_B (Nov 2, 2008)

not sure how IE handles colour management ... maybe there also lies a hidden problem. but I am no expert on this


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## Overread (Nov 2, 2008)

oh I think IE is horrible at it (From what I have read) but I was still trying to get to sRGB calibration - since that is the common one used by some external (online) printing labs.
btq your surfing in hidden mode - sneaky!


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## Alex_B (Nov 2, 2008)

Overread said:


> btq your surfing in hidden mode - sneaky!


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## freelunch (Nov 2, 2008)

My Dell 2408WPF monitor was way too red out of the box. I spent two days getting the colour to where I was happy with it. I don't have tools, though. I created a colour chart in Photoshop, concentrating on a range of tints in neutral grey. That "technique" seems to have worked fine.

I also noticed that every browser handles colour differently. Firefox and the Mozilla browsers are very saturated. Safari seems to be the most accurate, but I work on a Mac. 

The thing nobody seems to account for is how each person sees colour, i.e. colour blindness!

Good luck!


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## Garbz (Nov 4, 2008)

Freelunch, Firefox and Mozilla need colour management expressly enabled. The Dell 2408WPF is a wide gamut screen so without colour management your colours will look very saturated anyway. In case you use it fire up Firefox and type "about:config" in the address bar. Change gfx.color_management.enabled to true, and point "gfx.color_management.display_profile" to your display profile (either downloaded from the web, or better yet created with a calibrator) e.g. "C:\WINDOWS\system32\spool\drivers\color\LCD2690WUXi 81106573YB.icm" With that firefox will behave perfectly on your screen. Incidentally this same profile should be loaded into windows colour management or photoshop will spit out the wrong colours too. 

Overread there doesn't look like there is anything wrong with the output from your software. Certainly the numbers are sane. You say it wanted 80cd/m^2 for the brightness? That is ludicrous. You would barely be able to see the screen if the room lights are of standard office brightness. As with the curves, it's a minor detail. The sRGB profile specifies a curve which is very similar to Gamma 2.2 so if you can't set it explicitly just pick gamma 2.2 as you already have.


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## Overread (Nov 4, 2008)

Garbz thanks for the advice - I also contact their helpdesk and got a responce back where the techy was surprised that my moniter had a brightness adjustment and said that it was more likley to be a backlight setting - sure enough changing the calibration to read my moniter as having a backlight adjustment and no brightness allowed me to go through calibration without a problem 

In all fairness its called a brightness setting on my screen - and its got the same symbol as backlight.............talk about confusing!


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## manaheim (Nov 4, 2008)

Overread said:


> Garbz thanks for the advice - I also contact their helpdesk and got a responce back where the techy was surprised that my moniter had a brightness adjustment and said that it was more likley to be a backlight setting - sure enough changing the calibration to read my moniter as having a backlight adjustment and no brightness allowed me to go through calibration without a problem
> 
> In all fairness its called a brightness setting on my screen - and its got the same symbol as backlight.............talk about confusing!


 
No way, that's weird.

Glad you got it fixed though.


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## Overread (Nov 4, 2008)

yep - but everything is so dark now (well compared to what it was before)! Its going to take a while to get used to the new lighting setup and I might just setup a second calibration mode with brighter backlight - else I am going to start telling everyone I comment on a photo of that they could make it brighter


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## Pure (Jul 5, 2009)

To bring this back to life....

When calibrating a MAC laptop, since you adjust brightness with 2 buttons, should i set it to max before calibrating?


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## JerryPH (Jul 5, 2009)

Another factor to consider... can the browser that you are using take advantage of the new calibration or is it simply screwing things up a little?

Your calibration could be ok, but the browser not able to use the new settings and just give you all kinds of strange colour casts.


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## Garbz (Jul 6, 2009)

Pure: I believe the brightness should always be set as high as possible, but it won't matter. One thing is certain and that's that the calibration will only be valid for one brightness setting.


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