I need help from people with calibrated and high gamut monitors.

Connor Moore said:
But if I calibrate my display, it looks perfect to me but different to everyone else. This makes no sense to me.
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This should make complete sense to you... calibration changes the way things are displayed on your monitor; typically to match a known output device (i.e. printer). It helps to understand that the monitor profile is the last step/stage in color management and it is specific to that monitor. That's exactly why many programs are not fully color managed; it removes that last variable, and the potential of bad monitor profiles, from affecting them.

Connor Moore said:
So this is a colour profile problem and not a screen problem
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If you only see the issue on your phone it could be "a screen problem"... the phone's (which would not be surprising at all to me).
But since you have confirmed the issue only arises when you use the profile you created; that means the profile is the issue. Either it is a bad profile, it was installed incorrectly, or the system is applying it incorrectly for some reason (perhaps some secondary color management is causing double profiling, which is bad).
I don't use an X1 so I don't know what all of the settings/options are, and I know some of the settings like contrast are not available on a laptop (at least not my MBp). The issue seems fairly subtle to me on my computer with the example images. Maybe you just had your monitor brightness set too high when calibrating... luminance and saturation are closely connected. It's also possible that you got a bad colorimeter, it was dirty, or something else.

Connor Moore said:
and £2000 for a laptop that shows 100% of the RGB and Adobe RGB colour spectrum but it's going to waste and not being used.
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That's not the case... calibration doesn't make the monitor capability/gamut any different. It simply remaps values so that they fall at/closer to the right point w/in the gamut (assuming a good profile properly implemented).
 
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sk66 said:
This should make complete sense to you... calibration changes the way things are displayed on your monitor; typically to match a known output device (i.e. printer). It helps to understand that the monitor profile is the last step/stage in color management and it is specific to that monitor. That's exactly why many programs are not fully color managed; it removes that last variable, and the potential of bad monitor profiles, from affecting them.


If you only see the issue on your phone it could be "a screen problem"... the phone's (which would not be surprising at all to me).
But since you have confirmed the issue only arises when you use the profile you created; that means the profile is the issue. Either it is a bad profile, it was installed incorrectly, or the system is applying it incorrectly for some reason (perhaps some secondary color management is causing double profiling, which is bad).
I don't use an X1 so I don't know what all of the settings/options are, and I know some of the settings like contrast are not available on a laptop (at least not my MBp). The issue seems fairly subtle to me on my computer with the example images. Maybe you just had your monitor brightness set too high when calibrating... luminance and saturation are closely connected. It's also possible that you got a bad colorimeter, it was dirty, or something else.


That's not the case... calibration doesn't make the monitor capability/gamut any different. It simply remaps values so that they fall at/closer to the right point w/in the gamut (assuming a good profile properly implemented).
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Okay so reading online more people are saying don't use the software that come with the x-rite calibrator, people recommend downloading Display Cal to calibrate the display as it's the best out and open source, apparently. So I'm gonna download that tomorrow and remove X-Rite Profiler software and see if that fixes anything.
 
Have you printed the image yet?

This is all very pointless otherwise. You are experiencing just what anyone else who sees your photo digitally will experience, regardless of if it looks right to you.
 
When I started printing photos 'for real' I found that the printed photo was dark and colours different to those on screen. It didn't bother me that much as I never really printed photos and just put it down to the printer.

When I did start printing photos I played about with printer settings and ended up with prints matching the screen. Only thing was the print setting was at +3 brightness.

I then produced a calendar for a group I was in and sent the files to the printer who told me all the images were dark and needed a but post processing to get them right. He explained about calibration so I purchased a Colormunki and for the first time I was able to set defaults on the printer & get both my monitors almost perfectly matched.

Calendar files set to the printer didn't need altering. I now use a Spyder 5 pro. and personally I think it is better than Colormunki but not by a great lot.
 
most commercial printers will supply a profile for there prints for you to apply to the images you want printing. the advantage to having a calibrated screen is that you know the balance of the colour in the image is right before you apply the printers profile therefore you should get a more accurate representation of what you see on your screen. if you look at the image on your srceen when the printers profile has been added it will look wrong, but when its printed the results should be right
 
Craigus said:
Have you printed the image yet?

This is all very pointless otherwise. You are experiencing just what anyone else who sees your photo digitally will experience, regardless of if it looks right to you.
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I'm not doing print. I'm exporting for web
 
steve_lyt said:
most commercial printers will supply a profile for there prints for you to apply to the images you want printing. the advantage to having a calibrated screen is that you know the balance of the colour in the image is right before you apply the printers profile therefore you should get a more accurate representation of what you see on your screen. if you look at the image on your srceen when the printers profile has been added it will look wrong, but when its printed the results should be right
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I'm not exporting for print
 
Dangerous said:
When I started printing photos 'for real' I found that the printed photo was dark and colours different to those on screen. It didn't bother me that much as I never really printed photos and just put it down to the printer.

When I did start printing photos I played about with printer settings and ended up with prints matching the screen. Only thing was the print setting was at +3 brightness.

I then produced a calendar for a group I was in and sent the files to the printer who told me all the images were dark and needed a but post processing to get them right. He explained about calibration so I purchased a Colormunki and for the first time I was able to set defaults on the printer & get both my monitors almost perfectly matched.

Calendar files set to the printer didn't need altering. I now use a Spyder 5 pro. and personally I think it is better than Colormunki but not by a great lot.
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I'm exporting for web not for print
 
ST1 said:
@ Connor, why don’t you post an image that you consider to be compromised by your calibration on here so people can give you feedback on the published image rather than multitudes of words that you seem not to agree with.
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Like the one in his first post ?
 
I am struggling to see the whole point of the exercise
Fair enough if it was being used for print, but no matter what you do others won't see it as you intend.
Calibrate as much as you like, but if somebody views it on a screen with their own adjustments, what does it matter?
So if the export is different does that matter, in fact why bother at all, save yourself the angst and adjust to your liking
 
tijuana taxi said:
I am struggling to see the whole point of the exercise
Fair enough if it was being used for print, but no matter what you do others won't see it as you intend.
Calibrate as much as you like, but if somebody views it on a screen with their own adjustments, what does it matter?
So if the export is different does that matter, in fact why bother at all, save yourself the angst and adjust to your liking
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Finally common sense, and yet people in the industry (outside print) still have this blind one track argument that if you don’t calibrate your an idiot and have no clue about what you are doing. For Print calibrate, everything else why bother.
 
Connor, the best thing to do is sell your calibration device, adjust your monitor to how you like it and move on with life with the knowledge that if someone says “should I calibrate” you can with experience shout NO you fool.......(unless you print most stuff)
 
Studio488commercial said:
adjust your monitor to how you like it
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My background is in a fully colour managed workflow where fidelity can be make or break i.e a trace fossil may be only distinguished from the matrix if the colour is accurate also much of my work was for print in scientific journals.... Whilst I may not always see eye to eye with Studio488 I totally agree that in this situation and only publishing to the internet colour calibration is probably a pointless exercise, have a look at what your exports look on a number of devices and adjust as needed.
 
ST1 said:
@ Connor, why don’t you post an image that you consider to be compromised by your calibration on here so people can give you feedback on the published image rather than multitudes of words that you seem not to agree with.
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I feel like a lot of people are replying to this thread and not actually reading the top of the thread I have added an image and people keep commenting about print when I stated I'm not doing it for print
 
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PhilH04 said:
My background is in a fully colour managed workflow where fidelity can be make or break i.e a trace fossil may be only distinguished from the matrix if the colour is accurate also much of my work was for print in scientific journals.... Whilst I may not always see eye to eye with Studio488 I totally agree that in this situation and only publishing to the internet colour calibration is probably a pointless exercise, have a look at what your exports look on a number of devices and adjust as needed.
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Yeah I agree with you, a lot wouldn't but I look on multiple devices without calibration and it's a lot closer to what it looks like on lightroom everywhere on any device. So I'm going to stick with no calibration. I just used intel graphics centre to slightly change the hue and bring the red down slightly in saturation. Also Dell computer come really saturated so had to lower the saturation of RGB to -20
 
Studio488commercial said:
Connor, the best thing to do is sell your calibration device, adjust your monitor to how you like it and move on with life with the knowledge that if someone says “should I calibrate” you can with experience shout NO you fool.......(unless you print most stuff)
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Hahahaha love this reply
 
Thank you all so much for all the help, it is appreciated!
 
tijuana taxi said:
I am struggling to see the whole point of the exercise
Fair enough if it was being used for print, but no matter what you do others won't see it as you intend.
Calibrate as much as you like, but if somebody views it on a screen with their own adjustments, what does it matter?
So if the export is different does that matter, in fact why bother at all, save yourself the angst and adjust to your liking
Click to expand...
There needs to be some limit to the "why bother" approach... it is quite possible to have a bad profile and not know it. And the characteristics of a monitor will drift over time, so what's good now might not be so good later.
There are ways to visually calibrate a monitor that do not involve buying a colorimeter... I would consider that generally adequate if not printing. But you do want some knowledge/assurance that you are not editing images so that they will look worse/bad to the majority of people.
 
sk66 said:
There needs to be some limit to the "why bother" approach... it is quite possible to have a bad profile and not know it. And the characteristics of a monitor will drift over time, so what's good now might not be so good later.
There are ways to visually calibrate a monitor that do not involve buying a colorimeter... I would consider that generally adequate if not printing. But you do want some knowledge/assurance that you are not editing images so that they will look worse/bad to the majority of people.
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I understand with what your saying but besides the profile and if it's accurate or not why are my images looking different and more saturated after export, even looking on the same laptop edited on. But when not calibrated it looks the same
 
Connor Moore said:
I feel like a lot of people are replying to this thread and not actually reading the top of the thread I have added an image and people keep commenting about print when I stated I'm not doing it for print
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Does it matter why you are exporting the image? IMHO it does not.

If your monitor is not calibrated correctly and you have adjusted it so you are happy with the image on screen then whether you export to print, pdf or web then (assuming your screen profile is very dark and you have lightened the image using the monitor controls) then any image you export will be dark. When others view it on their correctly calibrated screen it will look dark.

Calibrate you screen (which you reset to default first so again it will appear dark) and it will correct the profile and now appear correct on your screen.

Yes my first reply was referring to print but I could have added that putting my images on to a tablet they did not display correctly either. Again they were dark, not appearing as bad as the brightness of my tablet was set quite high.

The profile the computer uses should be set to a standard (which is what colormunki & Spyder equipment does), The monitor will then display an image created by that profile and the user tweaks the monitor to their liking. If that profile is badly wrong, too light or too dark, duff colours etc. you can adjust your monitor to suit you but should others? Images I produce seem fine, Images from the web seem fine as do images from others who pass them on to me. If I get an image that has been created with a bad profile and it looks wrong on my monitor I will not adjust my monitor. What I may do is post process the image to correct it if I can, if not I don't bother with it. If all the images from one person are like that I wouldn't bother looking at their images again.
 
Dangerous said:
Does it matter why you are exporting the image? IMHO it does not.

If your monitor is not calibrated correctly and you have adjusted it so you are happy with the image on screen then whether you export to print, pdf or web then (assuming your screen profile is very dark and you have lightened the image using the monitor controls) then any image you export will be dark. When others view it on their correctly calibrated screen it will look dark.

Calibrate you screen (which you reset to default first so again it will appear dark) and it will correct the profile and now appear correct on your screen.

Yes my first reply was referring to print but I could have added that putting my images on to a tablet they did not display correctly either. Again they were dark, not appearing as bad as the brightness of my tablet was set quite high.

The profile the computer uses should be set to a standard (which is what colormunki & Spyder equipment does), The monitor will then display an image created by that profile and the user tweaks the monitor to their liking. If that profile is badly wrong, too light or too dark, duff colours etc. you can adjust your monitor to suit you but should others? Images I produce seem fine, Images from the web seem fine as do images from others who pass them on to me. If I get an image that has been created with a bad profile and it looks wrong on my monitor I will not adjust my monitor. What I may do is post process the image to correct it if I can, if not I don't bother with it. If all the images from one person are like that I wouldn't bother looking at their images again.
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I understand there would be differences in images over different screens but this is a profile issue not a screen issue. The images don't look darker or lighter they just come out more saturated in the reds. So I would have to lower the reds saturation in lightroom till it looks just undersaturated enough so that when I export it looks like I intended it to be but it doesn't in lightroom because I had to lower it more than I would of. Basically compensating for the export change in colours.

I just don't understand why the image is changing after export when viewed in a none colour managed software. I exported as SRGB so shouldn't that then make it SRGB and looks the same no matter the colour management
 
Connor Moore said:
I understand with what your saying but besides the profile and if it's accurate or not why are my images looking different and more saturated after export, even looking on the same laptop edited on. But when not calibrated it looks the same
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If you are exporting the image to a website and that website uploads it for viewing then maybe their profile is different so it looks wrong when you view off their website. Maybe their systems have some sort of image correction software processing uploads as I'm sure they must get some unusable images that do need adjusting. Not sure if it works that way but I assume it does.
 
I mentioned light & dark as an example, if could just as easily be saturation or any of the other settings within the profile. Do you export the file to you computer then import back in to lightroom to view and see the difference?
 
Dangerous said:
I mentioned light & dark as an example, if could just as easily be saturation or any of the other settings within the profile. Do you export the file to you computer then import back in to lightroom to view and see the difference?
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No I use Windows photo viewer. It's not colour managed but it shouldn't have to be since the file is exported as SRGB profile
 
Whilst in an ideal world we would all be using a standardised display i.e. calibrated and profiled and I admit that I am an advocate of a correctly calibrated and profiled monitor, at least I know then that what I am sending out to clients is correct, I am also very aware that once out of my hands the device used to view the images will more than likely not be calibrated... If things are looking ok when you work with your system uncalibrated then it may not be worth trying to calibrate.

However when using a fully calibrated and profiled system I do find it very useful to use the soft proofing function as this will then show what effect the conversion to sRGB will have and you can then compensate for export. Simply select the soft proof function and choose sRGB as the profile.
 
PhilH04 said:
Whilst in an ideal world we would all be using a standardised display i.e. calibrated and profiled and I admit that I am an advocate of a correctly calibrated and profiled monitor, at least I know then that what I am sending out to clients is correct, I am also very aware that once out of my hands the device used to view the images will more than likely not be calibrated... If things are looking ok when you work with your system uncalibrated then it may not be worth trying to calibrate.

However when using a fully calibrated and profiled system I do find it very useful to use the soft proofing function as this will then show what effect the conversion to sRGB will have and you can then compensate for export. Simply select the soft proof function and choose sRGB as the profile.
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Okay so I did use the softproofing function before export but when I view the file in SRGB it looks the exact same but then when I export it, it looks differently
 
when you export as SRGB you are changing the colour profile , so yes its going to change , it depends on what your camera is set to it maybe set to adobe. if they change then maybe lightroom is altering the image on export
 
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steve_lyt said:
when you export as SRGB you are changing the colour profile , so yes its going to change , it depends on what your camera is set to
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sRGB is a colour space not a profile, what the camera is set to will have no effect whatsoever. The problem the OP is having seems to be a bit complex and I think is going to be difficult to pinpoint on a forum as we can only speculate...
 
steve_lyt said:
I still think that if your screens are calibrated , you stand a better chance of getting the colour right. Instead of guessing whats wrong
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It's abbit.ore complicated than that
 
steve_lyt said:
I still think that if your screens are calibrated , you stand a better chance of getting the colour right. Instead of guessing whats wrong
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Absolutely, as I stated my background is in colour critical scientific photography, but, as Connor states the problem here seems to be rather complex and to be honest without physically looking at the calibration and workflow in person is, in my humble opinion going to be difficult to pinpoint on a forum...

One thing that has been mentioned (we are talking about quality of the profile) is that the monitor was calibrated and profiled in a darkened room, is that your normal working condition Connor? I will always calibrate and profile under the ambient light conditions that I normally work under.
 
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exactly , the only way to solve the problem is to chip at it one part at a time. so getting the images the right colour balance , is step one. step 2 is try something different either a none adobe product or try one image in photoshop and see if it still happens, its a matter of eliminating the possiblities
 
Connor Moore said:
I understand with what your saying but besides the profile and if it's accurate or not why are my images looking different and more saturated after export, even looking on the same laptop edited on. But when not calibrated it looks the same
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It pretty much has to be a bad profile, or something double profiling IMO.
 
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