Beyond screen calibration

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Peter
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I use Colormunki to calibrate my display but I was thinking: Does my monitor display all colours?

It is an oldish Dell Studio. Even though it is calibrated can I check which colours can't be correctly displayed.
I was thinking of using soft proofing using the calibrated profile

Any ideas if this will work or perhaps a better way of doing it?

I already have a 16million colour tiff image
 
isn't the whole point about calibration so that the colors are displayed correctly?

within the gamut confines of your monitor


to be fair, if the reputation of your business doesn't rely on 100% color accuracy, then I think just a hardware calibration is probably enough
 
I'm not sure about your software, but I use a Spyder4Pro and at the end of every calibration, the software shows the color spage of my display.
 
Thanks for replies.
I wasn't sure what section to put this in.
The X-rite software just gives a pretty picture of before and after.
I found a tiff calibration image with 16million colours. I guess if I soft proof this with the calibrated profile it will show out of gamut colours?
 
Calibration = manipulating the output to match as closely as possible a desired response
Profiling = measuring the response for a given stimulus so you can map how the display actually displays. The profile is then used in colour managed apps to more accurately represent colours on screen.

An ideal calibration will result in a profile that does "nothing" but there is no such thing as an ideal calibration.

Note none of the above says what colour space you are calibrating or profiling to, and a tiff image with 16 million colours doesn't say what colour space it is representing (a 16 million colour sRGB image will have a different colour gamut to the same 16 million colour image but with a Pro Photo colour space).

Soft proofing maps image colour space to output colour space - soft proofing may or may not show out of gamut, depending on what your monitor has been profiled/calibrated to (and no, it won't show "all" colours) and what the profile of the image is. So the answer is... it depends...
 
One problem as Andy has pointed out, is that the actual colour space you are viewing in does have a significant effect. Plus the ability of the monitor to resolve those colours.
For example if you have a green that is at the limit of Adobe RGB and you monitor can only resolve sRGB, then the profiled system cannot accurately show you that green as it is out of it's gamut. What it will do is adjust the image so that the visual colour relationships stay the same

Some calibration software will show you deviations CEDP does this in the neutral scale. The X-Rite i1 software visually shows you if it's unable to calibrate a patch correctly' I don't know if the colormunki does this.
 
With the Spyder software it shows how your monitor performs against the known common profiles.

In my case I have two monitors, a budget ACER and an expensive Samsung.

The ACER only just manages to show 100% of sRGB the much more expensive Samsung manages to only show 96% of sRGB.

NOTE to oneself, must get some better monitors.

Paul
 
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