So I got a fancy new monitor. A monitor known for its amazing color accuracy (among other things). As soon as I hooked it up, first thing I do is calibrate it with my trusty Eye-One Display 2.
Oddly enough, the pre- and post-calibration comparisons don’t seem far off. Odd especially in light of the fact that one of the complaints about the monitor is that its default color accuracy is pretty off. But it seems mostly fine to my eyes, so I ignore it.
Then I go to Songza to listen to a song and my eyes practically bleed from the saturation of the red color of the site. I may not have the best eye for color accuracy, but I know plain as day that the reds are waaaay off.
Here’s the thing, though – the calibrator says everything’s fine. I’ve run it at least five times and it keeps coming back the same.
What gives? I’m using the calibrated color profile. It’s all set up fine under the Display Properties. I tried installing the MS Color Control Panel but it kept aborting halfway through (does it not work under XP 64?), and UltraMon doesn’t appear to have anything for color correction, so I’m stuck with the default Windows tools.
Is there a third party calibration app I can try out? Or maybe some sort of colorscan app that could let me use my Eye-One to read the colors I’m seeing so I can compare the RGB values of what I’m seeing to what I should be seeing?
Any advice would be greatly appreciated. I was so excited to finally have a “Big Boy Monitor,” and now that I do the colors are inexplicably off. :(
EDIT: Also, I still have my old monitor (Dell 2005FPW) set up as the secondary, and when I drag the browser window there, the colors are much closer to what I’m used to. And it’s even using the profile that was created for the HP, so you’d expect the color to be off. But it’s more faithful than on the calibrated HP.
Is it one of the monitors that display an extended colour gamut (like the Dell 2408WFP I own)? If so, lower end or older calibration devices can’t always cope with the extended gamut and just return results which are off.
I had to ditch my Spyder 2 and upgrade to a Spyder 3 to calibrate my Dell and I got much better results. This might be your issue.
Wendelius speaks the truth. I also have the Dell 2408WFP and also had a Spyder 2 that wouldn’t calibrate it correctly. I’m not sure if the Eye-One Display 2 has the same issue but it is certainly worth looking into.
One thing to note though is that not all programs properly respect color profile information (far from it, in fact), so it isn’t that uncommon to have a situation where your high end monitor is properly calibrated and looks fantastic in Photoshop and other programs that are color profile aware and then looks either oversaturated or washed out in other apps, web browsers (Firefox has an option for turning on color management profile support, but defaults to off), etc.
Shouldn’t you actually expect the monitor to look different than your old one, even if it is calibrated correctly?
That is, your old monitor physically could not show saturated reds and greens as well as your new one, so if it was being told to show a color off its gamut, it’d approximate to the edge of its gamut, right? So theoretically, your new one could be more vivid, more saturated, different, but still more correct.
Except I’m not sure how that would work for, say, web content. Obviously in Photoshop images have color profiles associated with them, so if you have a pixel that’s #ff0000, you know where that is in a color space, and you know that an sRGB image probably will look the same on both monitors, but (say) a ProPhoto RGB image will probably not, if it has saturated colors. But in a web browser, does #ff0000 just mean “the most red color that the monitor can produce”, or is HTML assumed to be specifying some particular color space?
I think this may be it. I used a Firefox colorpicker to get the hex of the background and created the color in Photoshop; it looks vastly different.
This is the first I’ve seen of this phenomenon, though. I’ve always kept my monitors calibrated, and I’ve never seen Firefox render colors so differently before.
Do you know how I can fix this? I really need Firefox to report colors accurately.
EDIT: Found it! Set up proper CM in Firefox and everything looks good now. Apparently this is a common issue when using wide gamut monitors; browsers bork the color reporting. I’ve never had a wide gamut monitor before, so I never had to deal with it before.
FWIW, Windows 7 has better support for wide gamut monitor color profiles for apps that don’t do their own color management. Of course the trade-off there is that since it is still in beta you might have trouble getting your color calibration software or colorimeter drivers working with it right now.
Yeah. I’ve got Win7 on my laptop and love it, but am a firm believer in not fixing what ain’t broke, so it won’t be getting anywhere near my desktop (which is my photography workstation) until well after it’s been released.
Glad you found an answer. I was going to suggest double-checking to make sure you didn’t have other color management processes going; for example, people often forget to disable Adobe Gamma.
