Colour calibration: I’m confused again

[Thornton]

I acquired a Spyder 5 Express the other day, and calibrated my laptop monitor. I was pleased that I can now hopefully be reasonably confident that others will see my images as I do, in terms of colour and contrast, and vice versa. Or so I thought.

But I’m confused again. My monitor is hopefully pretty accurate now in terms of sRGB, and I’m not planning on any advanced printing, so I’m not concerned about Adobe RGB. But I just read, in a book about Canon DPP, the advice to get the program to use one’s colour profile. So, would this only apply if I was going to be concerned with Adobe RGB? My basic Spyder software cannot (AFAIK) provide the user with any info. about the percentage of colour spaces the screen can display, but I believe that sRGB should be pretty good on my laptop now, Adobe RGB presumably far less well covered.

So, for web viewing and low-end printing, can I just ensure that everything set to the common sRGB?
I’m just assuming that once the screen is calibrated, the display, whatever one is seeing on it, will be displaying colour guided by the Spyder corrections (I know that it is sensible to re-calibrate periodically). Do I need to do anything in the settings in DPP, PSE, Silkypix or Affinity Photo, other than ensure that I output in sRGB?

Thanks,

Julian

[dje]

Julian your monitor profile should ensure that any colors within the gamut of your monitor are faithfully reproduced irrespective of the software you are using, providing it is properly color managed. It doesn't matter what the woking color space is. However if you are using say Above RGB, there may be some colors which are out of gamut and these will be brought in gamut using a process called rendering intent. There's a CIC tutorial on this subject.

Dave

[pschlute]

I acquired a Spyder 5 Express the other day, and calibrated my laptop monitor. I was pleased that I can now hopefully be reasonably confident that others will see my images as I do, in terms of colour and contrast, and vice versa. Or so I thought.

Of course that assumes that others will be viewing on a colour managed application on a colour calibrated screen !! Such are the vagaries of the web.

The one thing i do suggest is to make sure your web browser is colour managed and has the correct settings applied. I use Firefox and follow these guides.. https://cameratico.com/guides/firefox-color-management/

[Thornton]

Thanks for the replies.
I can be remarkably dim sometimes, so to reduce it to my level can I just put it like this:
Having calibrated my screen, and outputting to the commonest sRGB, for screen viewing only, what changes to my photo programs might I need to make? There seems to be an option in DPP: “Colour matching settings”. Under this is the option: “For display”, with the options of either setting sRGB or setting the profile my Spyder created (by browsing to it). It seems I should use my Spyder profile. But I don’t know how to do the same in PSE (or whether it can even be done).

My understanding of this issue is probably highly simplistic, but essentially I expected it to work like this: that the Spyder would correct my screen colours, that I would then have more accurate colour when editing, and that when anyone with a calibrated monitor saw my photos, they would be seeing a fair approximation of what I see, and when I viewed a photo created by another person with a calibrated screen, I would be seeing a reasonable approximation of what they saw on their screen. What I don’t understand is why I need to take any action in DPP or any other program if my screen is now calibrated. Unfortunately, the more I’ve read on the topic, the more confused I’ve become.

Julian

[Polar01]

Julian once you set your monitors profile to your custom Spyder profile, every time you start your system is will load. Does not matter which software you are using to do your images with.

Cheers: Al

[pschlute]

Having calibrated my screen, and outputting to the commonest sRGB, for screen viewing only, what changes to my photo programs might I need to make? There seems to be an option in DPP: “Colour matching settings”. Under this is the option: “For display”, with the options of either setting sRGB or setting the profile my Spyder created (by browsing to it). It seems I should use my Spyder profile. But I don’t know how to do the same in PSE (or whether it can even be done).

If you have an option then select the profile your Spyder ceated. It is a while since I used PSE and I cannot remember if such option exists. if it does not then your profile should be selected automatically as it is the one that the system is set to use.

My understanding of this issue is probably highly simplistic, but essentially I expected it to work like this: that the Spyder would correct my screen colours, that I would then have more accurate colour when editing, and that when anyone with a calibrated monitor saw my photos, they would be seeing a fair approximation of what I see, and when I viewed a photo created by another person with a calibrated screen, I would be seeing a reasonable approximation of what they saw on their screen. What I don’t understand is why I need to take any action in DPP or any other program if my screen is now calibrated.

It is a confusing topic and I don't pretend to be an expert on it. But i think the answer is this :

Any colour managed program/app which outputs an image for your computer/screen to display will do so correctly as long as the image itself has a properly tagged icc profile. So if you open a sRBG tagged image in PSE or Silkypix or a colour managed web program like Firefox, you should be seeing the same colours as the person who created them assuming they used a colour managed workflow.

But what happens if you open an image which is not tagged ? How that will be displayed will now depend on your program/app settings rather than your computer/screen. I think ?!

Have a look here for more confusion....http://www.gballard.net/psd/go_live_...Gprofiles.html

[dje]

What I don’t understand is why I need to take any action in DPP or any other program if my screen is now calibrated. Unfortunately, the more I’ve read on the topic, the more confused I’ve become.

Julian

Julian I had a look at DPP (which I rarely use) and you are probably referring to the following screen



In the top box, you can select what color space you want as the working color space during editing. This sort of selection is available in most decent editors.

In the second box, you are given a choice of what profile is used for display on the monitor. Now this is a little unusual and not something used in most editors. The color management process is usually automatic whereby the editing software works in conjunction with the operating system (OS in the check box) and uses the monitor profile selected as the default. This would be your Spyder profile. In DPP you should use either the OS settings or find the Spyder profile manually. They should give the same result if your SPyder profile is set as the default.

I don't have PSE but I had a look in PS CS6 and Affinity and can't see any option in these to set the display profile (and it shouldn't be necessary).

Dave

[Manfred M]

sRGB is the lowest common denominator when it comes to photography. It can display about 1/3 of the colours that your camera captures. Fortunately, they are also the most common colours, so unless you are dealing with very bright and vibrant colours, you are likely in good shape using this colour space. You should check the spec sheet for your laptop; unless it says it is 100% sRGB compliant, it probably isn’t.

Your Spyder should carry out two separate operations. The first is calibration which ensures that your screen brightness and contrast are set to appropriate values. The second part is profiling where the Spyder software attempts to ensure that the colours that you see are displayed accurately. It cannot make a screen that is not sRGB compliant into one that is.

The other steps you should look at is ensuring that you work in a room that is not too bright to maximize image contrast. Ideally the room has neutral colours so that your eyes are not fooled by the surroundings.

When your computer starts up, it should automatically loaded the generated profile.

[Thornton]

Many thanks for the replies.
I feel more confident now that everything will soon be set up as it should be. It was this extra step in DPP which threw me, because I thought I was missing something and needed maybe to alter settings in other programs too. In the book about DPP which I referred to, there are only two options in the dialog box (sRGB or Monitor Profile). The book is about an older version (3) of DPP and the version Dave shows above in this thread is, I assume, from the newer version, which I use too now (but on my laptop which I’m not using right now, so I can’t check). So I’ll go into the settings and change to O.S.


Julian

[Cantab]

Of course that assumes that others will be viewing on a colour managed application on a colour calibrated screen !! Such are the vagaries of the web.

The one thing i do suggest is to make sure your web browser is colour managed and has the correct settings applied. I use Firefox and follow these guides.. https://cameratico.com/guides/firefox-color-management/

Peter, I had a look at the article you cited as well as some of the rather dated Firefox articles he refers to. The premise of the article seemed to be that having a profiled wide gamut Adobe RGB monitor would result in awful looking images on Firefox. I've had no such experience and am left wondering how reliable the info about colour managed browsers really is. It's not an area I have technical expertise in but do have my personal experience with Firefox.

[george013]

Peter, I had a look at the article you cited as well as some of the rather dated Firefox articles he refers to. The premise of the article seemed to be that having a profiled wide gamut Adobe RGB monitor would result in awful looking images on Firefox. I've had no such experience and am left wondering how reliable the info about colour managed browsers really is. It's not an area I have technical expertise in but do have my personal experience with Firefox.

Also an old article. Look at the test here http://regex.info/blog/photo-tech/color-spaces-page2. The rest is worth reading too.

George

[pschlute]

Peter, I had a look at the article you cited as well as some of the rather dated Firefox articles he refers to. The premise of the article seemed to be that having a profiled wide gamut Adobe RGB monitor would result in awful looking images on Firefox. I've had no such experience and am left wondering how reliable the info about colour managed browsers really is. It's not an area I have technical expertise in but do have my personal experience with Firefox.

I think the article is actually saying that in Firefox the default colour management setting gfx.color_management_mode 2 will correctly display any tagged images. Untagged images and any other web page elements will not. Changing the setting to gfx.color_management_mode 1 corrects this.

I use a wide gamut monitor and leaving the Firefox setting on the default leads to oversaturated colours on web pages, although tagged images will display correctly. Changing the setting to the one recommended means that web pages now look the same as they would look on a sRGB monitor.

[xpatUSA]

The one thing i do suggest is to make sure your web browser is colour managed and has the correct settings applied. I use Firefox and follow these guides.. https://cameratico.com/guides/firefox-color-management/

Thanks for the link, Peter. I've just set my FireFox as it recommends and now know where to go if I need to mess with it again ...

... like if I should buy a Rec. 2020 color monitor (just kidding).