Calibration problems on new monitor

[Gidders]

Originally Posted by Chris

Your Louth shot looks better pulled off the browser - I will stick my neck out and guess this is the real colour rather than sRGB, which is a good compromise for bad systems, but doesn't do full justice to colour (dives for cover before Clive sees this).

I agree the Louth shot colours look better but the embedded ICC profile with the image is HP w2408 wide HS New It looks as though you have got the working colour space of Photoshop set to the colour profile of your monitor. You should set the working colour space for Photoshop to one of the commonly recognised ones - sRGB or Adobe RGB - other specialist wide gamut work spaces are ColorMatch RGB or ProPhoto RGB. This is different to the colour profile of your monitor which is essentially a look up table to tell the monitor how to display the colours.

As Chris says - sRGB doesn't do full justice to colour because of its a fairly limited colour gamut... BUT unless you have spent approaching £1000 on an Eizo monitor or similar (how good is your system ), the sad fact of life is that your monitor will not physically display the colours of the wide gamut spaces (although printers can do better than monitors in some parts of the spectrum) . And even if it did, another sad fact of life is that most people viewing your images a) can't display them & b) even if they could, couldn't render them properly because they haven't got a browser that can read colour profiles.

Now let me say at this point I'm into colour management... I've got a spyder 3 & regularly re profile my monitor, I use Adobe RGB in all my image editing and I've had separate profiles written for various papers that I print on, but when I post to web I convert to sRGB. I've got Firefox 3.0.3 but... I can't be bothered to set my browser up for colour management - if people posting web images cant be bother to adhere to the sRGB standard well....

So

1) profile your monitor and make sure this profile is loaded when your OS starts
2) set the working colour space for photoshop to Adobe RGB is you are making prints but if just producing web images set to sRGB
3) have your printer papers profiled
4) before uploading to web ensure converted to sRGB

[Gidders]

Originally Posted by nirofo

Regardless of what colour profile you use when you save for web, when the image is uploaded to the web it is converted to SRGB,

I do not believe this is the case - there is no software doing the conversion which would require the ability to read ICC profiles, always assuming that the image being uploaded has one. As you can see from this post no conversion of the Adobe RGB image has taken place and the test card looks flat and lacking in contrast. However, it is true that the assumed standard for web images is sRGB

Originally Posted by nirofo

when you view the downloaded web image on your monitor you see the (assumed) sRGB image via your own monitor profile colour, this may or may not appear the same.

Absolutely... which is why you should post in sRGB

[nirofo]

Interesting web article here which sort of explains it all?

http://www.creativepro.com/article/t...r-in-photoshop

nirofo.

[Gidders]

Ok - that article assumes that you are preparing your images for uploading using Photoshop's "save for web" function and you have the "convert to sRGB" checked in the drop down dialogue - see attachment (it is by default so it will be unless you've messed with it ) This function also strips out the ICC profile and the EXIF data

If however you use "save" or "save as" for your images this preserves the EXIF data and ICC profile but no conversion of the colour space takes place. So if you work in photoshop in sRGB then your uploaded image will be sRGB , but if you work in Adobe RGB (or any other workspace) then that's how you image will remain. And in this case, as the majority of people surfing the web don't use colour managed web browsers, they will not see your image as you intended. Judging by the fact that most images on the forum here retain the EXIF data, I'm guessing that majority of people here use "save" or "save as" rather than "save for web" and therefore their images will not be converted to sRGB before uploading.

I have my photoshop workspace set to Adobe RGB - better for printing - but I convert to sRGB and then use "save as" to preserve the EXIF data for images for uploading.

Originally Posted by wolfie

On the Louth shot Saturation was not boosted in anyway, apart from using the Canon landscape profile within lightroom, which does boost the colours as against using such as the Camera Faithful profile.

I guess you are still a DDP user? if so you may not be conversant with Lightroom, although ACR in CS3 uses the same profiles.

The end result was as you surmised the result of the Spyder profile so was not output as sRGB, though to be quite honest there was very little to choose between the two.

Harry

I think it was about this time last year that I posted a shot I was having trouble with in the Crit forum and was so impressed with what Nick (Greenbunion, where are you Nick??) was able to do with other software that I realised DPP was not the answer....and maybe neither was the 350D. Got a Nikon D80 and used Nikon Capture NX ever since.

Going off thread, but I realised that the CR2 conversion pane in DPP had a sort of slipperiness on colour that was unsatisfactory. Things like the 'landscape' or 'portrait' setting analog the auto settings on the camera and why both 'neutral' and 'faithful'? Defeats the object of shooting manual. It may not matter so much with 5D and 1D (and 40D, 50D) as I assume their sensors are order-of-magnitude better.

When I return to 350D shots I never managed but didn't want to bin, I convert to .tif using PSE4 with absolutely no 'auto' settings, then take up again in NX2, and I think with far better results
http://www.worldphotographyforum.com...929&ppuser=780

I have never tried Lightroom, I imagine similar to (free) Nikon View NX. But from conversations with Duncan, if using anything other than Nikon, I would be looking at Capture 1 for RAW conversion.

Back to core of thread, I suppose I can see the differences as I do have a decent monitor (MacBook pro 15, built-in). As far as calibration is concerned, I am most impressed with the Spyder work done by my local Newent camera Club for digital projection. However that is in an otherwise dark room. On computer monitor, there is also highly variable ambient light and I toggle between internal calibrations for 'normal' in my studio/pigsty, ditto but at night and northlight, getting the grey greyest. Doesn't actually seem to make much difference to prints which used for editing, printer does what it likes

As far as all the technical aspects of the web, I can't see much trouble in using FF3 with colour management, nor with having one's editing programmes all at Adobe RGB...compared to trying to take decent pics in the first place.

[wolfie]

Clive I'm in full agreement with you, I've always used "Save As" and uploaded all my web photos as sRGB and I've never had a colour problem until using/setting up of the HP 24" monitor over the weekend.

With the Louth photo, after recalibrating again with the Spyder and doing a lot of reading on the web + comments in this thread, I decided to try out the new profile "HP w2408 wide HS New" which I had just created. I also output one as sRGB.

When these are viewed side by side on my monitor I can see no difference. Normally my workflow is, Lightroom to CS3 to Web is sRGB. As there is no discernible difference between my HP profile and sRGB I will switch back to sRGB.

Chris. I do little printing at home sending any work I require to Photobox so I use sRGB for most of my work. I was aware of your change to Nikon, but remembered your frequent mentions of DPP.

Harry