How do I adjust my monitor?

[Round Tuit]

A couple of weeks ago, I accidentally reset the colours on my wide gamut monitor. Getting the monitor back to its previous state shook my understanding of colour management and profiling.

The screen became very bright, contrasty and over saturated. My first reaction was to re-calibrate and profile the monitor. The process did not improve its appearance but resulted in a gamut that covered 79% of sRGB and 73% of AdobeRGB. Not exactly stellar performance for a wide gamut monitor that used to cover 92% of AdobeRGB.

The reset adjusted the brightness to 50%, the contrast to 80% and the saturation to 50%. Over the past two weeks, I have methodically adjusted each of these setting from 0% to 100% in steps of 20% and then re-calibrated and profiled. The conclusions from this experiment are:
1) Calibrating and profiling do not affect the appearance significantly,
2) Adjusting the brightness has no effect on the gamut,
3) Lowering the contrast increases the gamut and decreases the brightness,
4) Lowering the saturation decreases the gamut.

The best gamut that I achieved was 95% of AdobeRGB but the monitor was way too saturated to be useful. I ended up settling for a brightness of 85%, contrast of 10% and saturation of 35%. At these settings, the luminance of the screen is 70 cd/m2, the gamut covers 82% of AdobeRGB and my photos look "normal". In order to find these settings, I opened a copy of the PDI Target and eyeballed the skin tones while maximizing the gamut.

I think that I am back in business but I have a fondamental problem. If we agree that calibration and profiling cannot be properly done without an instrument to measure accurately the colours on the screen, then how do we adjust the settings of the monitor more rigorously than looking at it and picking a combination that we find pleasing? In other words, How can we be confident that images on our screens will look reasonably similar on someone else's screen when both are properly calibrated and profiled?

[DanK]

What puzzles me is why recalibration didn't work. Normally, that's all that's needed.

One thought I have is that most wide-gamut monitors are calibrated differently from others. Standard calibration software creates a profile read by the graphics adapter. Profiling most wide gamut monitors entails profiling the monitor's own hardware, the internal LUT that it uses. is it possible that you had the calibration tool and software set up to profile the wrong way?

[Manfred M]

If you have recalibrated and reprofiled your screen, you should be able to load the profile (including the old one) that are stored on your computer.

Open the PC Settings and the "System" and then click on "Display". You should see "Advanced Display Settings" near the bottom. Click on "Display Adapter Properties" and click on the "Color Management" tab.

From that The "Associate Color Profile" box will open and click on the "Add" button. That will open up ALL the colour profiles stored on your computer, not just the screen calibration ones. Find the profile for your screen and it should then become the default profile. You will have to reboot your computer for it to load.

I've shown you a partial work flow of the screens and pop ups you'll see.

[Round Tuit]

Thank you Dan and Manfred for confirming that the profile should have solved my problem.

My monitor is an ASUS PA240 that I bought in 2015. It is a "low end" wide gamut monitor that exceed the sRGB gamut but is not in the same class as the monitors that you currently use. I can confirm that the calibration data gets loaded in my Radeon Pro WX 3100 video card. I can also confirm that the Spyder4Express software that I use with the Spyder4 colorimetre stores the profile in the C:\...color folder and sets it as the default monitor profile. The only input to the software is the type of monitor that you are using. It does detect on its own that the PA240 is a wide gamut monitor that uses a CCFL backlight.

One last factoid: I don't recall ever having change any of the monitor's settings except the brightness before this problem occurred.

Any help you can provide will be greatly appreciated.

[Manfred M]

The bad news might be that they screen is failing as they sometimes do strange things when they are starting to fail. One of mine would periodically go dim and they get really bright. It died a few months later.

[Round Tuit]

Problem solved but I don't understand why.

In Windows 10, the default profile is a per user setting. There is also a system wide setting for users that don't set their own default profile. When I set the Spyder4 profile as the default for the whole system, every thing went back to normal.

Again, thanks for your help.

[DanK]

Glad to hear that the problem is solved.