Monitor calibration--blue turns purple

[One Sock]

I have a Spyder 3 that I used to calibrate the monitor on my Asus laptop. With the calibration turned on, my Windows 8 start screen turns purple. Photos of boats in blue water end up in not-so-blue water. I go in Corel Draw and set the color on R=0, G=0, B=255 (should be a perfect blue) and what do I get? Purple! Pretty much everything takes on a brownish/reddish tint.

Just wondering if anyone else has similar issues? Could it be a software or driver issue? My laptop has a 17-inch, 1920x1080 screen, and NVidia GTX 670MX graphics.

[Mike Buckley]

Make sure you have no ambient light in the room by calibrating at night with the blinds or draperies closed. Also make sure the settings on your monitor are set to the default settings. Last, make sure Spyder 3 is compatible with Windows 8.

If that doesn't solve the problem, I have no idea what to suggest. I've been using the Spyder products for years on two monitors and graphics cards and have never experienced any problems.

[Manfred M]

My first suggestion would be to re-run the profiling operation. If your sensor was not sitting on the screen properly, it can give you some erroneous results. If the problem continues, then it would be time to investigate.

One thing to remember is that laptop screens are often built to meet a price / battery life spec and colour accuracy can be way off. When I run a profile on my ASUS laptop (it has a touch screen), it has a blue colour cast; I never use it for accurate work and do use an desktop with a high gamut screen for my colour correction work. If you are planning to do some serious photo editing, you should look at a good external screen for your laptop.

[mrinmoyvk]

If you are planning to do some serious photo editing, you should look at a good external screen for your laptop.

And what could that be?
Any suggestions for 4x3 aspect ratio screen (prefer 4x3 because getting more than 1080 in wide screen is way expensive at least in India)

[Manfred M]

And what could that be?
Any suggestions for 4x3 aspect ratio screen (prefer 4x3 because getting more than 1080 in wide screen is way expensive at least in India)

Many of the lower end screens are built as commodity screens for general use computing; surfing the web, watching videos, etc. and accurate colour reproduction was not one of the key design requirements. This applies to screens found in both desktops and laptops. The profiling software will attempt to develop a profile that is as close to "correct" as it can get the screen to be, but in some cases, this is impossible. My laptop screen and second computer screen on my image editing computer display this characteristic. Both have a blue colour cast after profiling and cannot be used for photo editing work.

The best advice I can offer is to look for a screen that is promoted as being "wide gamut", i.e. covers 100% of the sRGB colour space AND and has a high compliance with the AdobeRGB colour space (say 97% and greater). These screens tend to have reasonably good colour accuracy, but I would suggest checking out reviews before deciding on a specific model, and yes, these tend to be more expensive than the lower end ones. But at least your edits will be more accurate.

As an aside; I use a dual-screen setup for my image editing. My "good" wide gamut screen has a 1920 x 1200 pixel native and my cheap one that has poor colour accuracy is a wide screen design with a native resolution of 1920 x 1080 pixels.

[russellsnr]

Hi, Just a thought but do you allow the screen to warm up before you start?. I use the i1Pro display to calibrate my screen and it always warns me if the screen has not been on for a minimum of 30 minutes.

[One Sock]

I buy most of my equipment used. Could I expect good results with a used wide gamut screen? Do they have a certain lifespan past which they are no longer color-accurate?

Hi, Just a thought but do you allow the screen to warm up before you start?

Yep, it was on for several hours.

[JR1]

I have a Spyder 3 that I used to calibrate the monitor on my Asus laptop. With the calibration turned on, my Windows 8 start screen turns purple. Photos of boats in blue water end up in not-so-blue water. I go in Corel Draw and set the color on R=0, G=0, B=255 (should be a perfect blue) and what do I get? Purple! Pretty much everything takes on a brownish/reddish tint.

Just wondering if anyone else has similar issues? Could it be a software or driver issue? My laptop has a 17-inch, 1920x1080 screen, and NVidia GTX 670MX graphics.

Not being funny now you you know why I have never ever calibrated a monitor in my life.

I have borrowed and tried most of the supposed calibration tools, and reverted to knowledge and experience of knowing your monitor/printer and paper

[Manfred M]

I buy most of my equipment used. Could I expect good results with a used wide gamut screen? Do they have a certain lifespan past which they are no longer color-accurate?

Yep, it was on for several hours.

The old cathode ray tube screens definitely got worse with age, the first generation(s) LCD ones did get worse with age, as the fluorescent tube providing the illumination aged (the tube would die eventually too); I remember reading that 7 years was probably a good number to go with here, but again that would depend on actual use. I suspect that the newer ones that use LCD technology for illumination will probably be reasonably stable for a lot longer.

The wide gamut Dell Ultrasharp series has traditionally be very good value for money; I know that a number of CiC members (including me) went that route.

[rubencarmona]

Try calibrating a different screen on a different machine and check if you get the same color tint, because if so, it would be a defective sensor unit and you would have to contact the support.

[ajohnw]

If the laptop doesn't use a LED for back lighting they do age but that usually just means calibrating more often.

I doubt if another aspect is the problem but I use an XYZ LUT calibration with a swapped matrix, r and b are swapped. This is done to try and make sure that software is using it correctly as it should check which is r g and b not make assumptions. I had a problem with firefox getting mixed up but this turned out to be down to my desktop software not being colour managed. Now I have fixed that all is ok. Photo apps run their own colour management so I didn't have any problems with them as they loaded and used my monitor profile. Oddly Opera and Chromium were ok too. You may have something similar going on.

John
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[Glenn NK]

I use Spyder 3 Elite occasionally; a month ago I calibrated my ancient NEC MultiSync and the colour was weak and dull. Finally got around to doing it again and everything is back to normal again.

Apparently I made a mistake in one of the choices during the previous calibration - it happens.