Treated myself to a new...

[AlwaysOnAuto]

monitor this Christmas. Figured I'd spent some money on my camera so might as well see what it can really do picture wise. My old monitor was 11 years old and came with my PC at the time. I now have a different PC, with an honest to gosh video card in it (AMD Radeon RX 580X 4GB GDDRV).

The monitor I purchased is a Lenovo ThinkVision P27u-10. I got it based on my wife complaining my pictures of her quilts weren't exactly color correct to her eyes, and on the specs this monitor has. It came with a calibration chart which I'll try to photograph tomorrow if you'd like to see it.

My question now is, is the monitor calibration tutorial here on the site applicable to this monitor or should I just leave it alone and use the choices the software it came with give me?
Thanks in advance. I'm seeing things in my pictures I've never seen before so I guess it's a good thing I upgraded.

[Manfred M]

The specs look good; the screen is 100% sRGB compliant and 99.5% Adobe RGB compliant, so it will do a very good job in reproducing colours accurately. Ideally you are working in a darkened room (light levels at the screen / work area below 70 lux) with neutral walls and your screen brightness set to between 80 and 120 candela / square meter.

Calibration charts are 100% useless, because they rely on human vision. The only way to correctly calibrate and profile a screen is to use an external device designed to do this; the x-Rite (ColorMunki or i1) and ColorData (Spyder) tools are required. I personally use the x-Rite i1 Display Pro. The profiling tool will let you set screen brightness.

The issue with your wife not quite matching what is seen on your screen is not at all surprising. Your screen is an additive colour, RGB, transmitted light device, whereas the quilt will be seen under reflected light, so unless you are controlling the light falling on it chances of the two being identical are virtually impossible. Outdoor light can vary from around 2800K at sunset to 10,000K and higher when looking at north light in mid-day. The light can be contaminated by the environment; trees and grass can give light a green colour cast.

That does not account for any visual issues your wife may have; our colour vision does deteriorate as we age.

[DanK]

Years ago, I tried to use Norman Koren's charts for calibrating without a tool. I wasn't able to get it to work.

Re brightness: there are three separate issues raised by Manfred: color accuracy, contrast, and brightness. In my experience, the brightness settings Manfred mentions are mostly important for getting the contrast and brightness of prints right and don't have much impact on perception of color. If the monitor is way out of calibration--and many new ones are not--then you will see large shifts in color when you calibrate, often a reduction of blues, that are quite apparent regardless of brightness. In some cases, the manufacturers are getting close enough that you won't see a substantial difference. It depends on how fussy you are. For example, my wide-gamut NEC monitor comes with several calibrations set at the factory. Nonetheless, they advise users to re-calibrate the monitor themselves because they assume that the people who splurge on a monitor of that sort do so because they want precise color rendition.

Since you got a wide gamut monitor, you will be better able to replicate on screen the colors in you see in your environment. However, you will have another issue: most people have their monitors that are at best sRGB, and many sites display in sRGB, which is a smaller color gamut than the Adobe RGB that your monitor can display. That means that once you have posted an image, it might look different on sRGB screens than it does when you are editing it .I have a wide-gamut monitor, and nonetheless, I find that I can ignore this most of the time. Not all of the time, however. I posted one case recently where my monitor displayed a red flower well but it came out oversaturated and lacking detail when compressed to the sRGB gamut. You'll be able to see this yourself if you export your images from your software to a website and then view it in a browser. Most of the time, it will look fine.

[AlwaysOnAuto]

This is the calibration report I got from the factory for my specific monitor.
I appreciate the input gentlemen.

[DanK]

That looks pretty good to me. Delta-E is a measure of how far off a given color is. The general rule of thumb is that Delta-E values of less than 1 are not discernible and that most people don't notice these deviations until a value of 3 or so. These charts show very low values except in the blues (fitting with my experience), but they have the blues under control, with delta-E values of 2 or less. So my guess is that unless you are doing color-critical printing, this is probably fine for out of the box in terms of color accuracy.

[AlwaysOnAuto]

Thanks Dan.
I have to admit, this monitor is really nice to look at and it is really great to see what my cameras are really capable of capturing.

Thank you both for your input here.
Happy New Year!