Color Management

[Marpel]

Not necessarily a strictly PWP issue, however...

I have had an NEC monitor for a thousand years. I also had a colorimeter that I used to calibrate it. After some time, the colorimeter was not recognized by the OS so I gave that up and just relied on the most recent settings (which are ancient by now).

This monitor has slowly died and I recently picked up a new monitor, which apparently has its own chip and components/3d LUT for calibration (using the monitor vendors calibration software). I think this is referred to as Hardware Calibration, rather than using a colorimeter, and unrelated calibration software, to provide data to the computers Graphics Card (Software Calibration?). I understand that Hardware calibration is preferred over Software calibration.

I have yet to pick up a new colorimeter, nor have I tried to do any calibrating, but I wanted to make sure of a few things in the meantime.

Over the last few years, I have noticed that the same image, when opened in PWP, shows as less saturated than the same image in PS even though I have replicated the Color Management settings in both programs, as best as I can understand anyway. So I wish to ensure I have settings in both programs that will give a like for like image.

In PWP Color Management I am unsure of a couple things:

1. "On Startup" it gives a choice of "Set Monitor Profile from System Settings" or "Ignore...". Once I calibrate as described above and the monitor will "hold the recipe", will PWP recognize/access these settings or will it look to the Graphics Card/OS to find settings? In other words, what does "System Settings" refer to?

2. "Monitor Profile". What does this refer to? I have had it set to "Adobe RGB 1998", and there seems to be no mention of an actual calibration profile that I can direct it to. Do I leave this at Adobe RGB and the a/m (point 1.) takes care of a particular calibration profile?

Any other advice regarding any aspect of Color/Monitor Management is appreciated.

[tonygamble]

I have yet to pick up a new colorimeter, nor have I tried to do any calibrating, but I wanted to make sure of a few things in the meantime.

Whilst you wait for Jonathan's advice on the settings I'll mention that I have an old (very old) ColorMunki device and use it whenever I change a monitor or PC.

I used the software from X-Rite (I think it was called Spyder) but more recently moved to DisplayCal.

https://displaycal.net/SNAPSHOT_README.html.gz

My feeling is that as long as the ColorMunki is not abused it will last for years and, if you want to conserve your cash, it might be worth buying an old model or even a used one.

I PWP my pix on a totally different machine to the one connected to my Epson and have never had problems with lack of colour(Brit) matching.

[Marpel]

Thanks Tony for the advice.

Although I have yet to purchase one, I have had a look around at the various ones available, have sort of settled on a mid-road one (Spyder) and will likely be using the program (Palette Masters Ultimate) available from the manufacturer of the monitor (BenQ). I have heard fairly decent comments about the program and the benefit, as already alluded to, is it allows a Hardware calibration due to the chip/3DLUT within the monitor itself. All articles and videos on this topic have suggested that Hardware calibration gets a bit better result (although whether one can actually see it is another matter).

[jsachs]

When you use a monitor calibrator, it creates a monitor profile and also sets up a program that runs invisibly during Windows startup that loads the LUTs in the display adaptor. In Color Management, you should either explicitly set the monitor profile to the profile created by the calibrator or have PWP use the system monitor profile which the calibrator sets to the monitor profile it generated.

You can get into trouble in a number of ways:

!) running two different calibrators on the same system. This causes the programs to fight over what the LUTs are loaded with and what is the system monitor profile. Make sure you uninstall old calibration software so only one is running at a time.

2) in PWP, setting the monitor profile to something other than the one created by the calibrator

3) running PWP with color management disabled

and probably some other things that I haven't thought of.