Manufacturer's presets are not very good. The newer hardware calibrators will do LCDs if they're not crappy 18 bit dithered TNs.

Are you Windows or Mac? What monitors?  You have to be specific in this forum.

Monitor calibration, as supplied by the manufacturer, can only go so far, and will not take into account the vagaries of your graphics card or its driver.  That was something I discovered after moving my 30inch Dell Ultrasharp to a new system, and where the monitor looked little different with the Huey Pro calibrator enabled and not enabled on the old box, it had a strong green cast before calibration on the new box.

Nonlinear function for all three colors, so no.

You can only calibrate your monitor and tell your critics to do the same.

I'm currently using a Spyder 3 Elite, its the second Colorvision product I'm familiar with and have been very pleased with it. I'm responsible for keeping a few dozen LCDs of various makes and ages in line for geospatial data production and they all end up appearing reasonably close. My Samsung T260 and the output from my Z6100 printer are very close and that's what counts most for me. The Spyder's a piece of cake to use too.

I'm sure there will be other recommendations coming but if you're serious about color management, hardware calibration is the only way to go IMHO.

Good luck!

Here's a photo of my pair of monitors where the gamma is pretty much dead on at 2.2.

-Noel

Timo Autiocari (that may not be the right spelling), possibly.  He may have been the author of this target.  The site listed on the target is long gone.

-Noel

I think he was more rabid about editing at gamma 1.0 rather than monitor calibration, and all the "evils" it caused to edit in gamma 2.2 space - though I can easily imagine he might have argued that everything would be simpler if it all would just be linear, from image to display.

It's quite possible to edit in gamma 1.0 now.  I have a custom profile I convert to when I want to do so with a 16 bits/channel document.  There are cases in astroimage processing where this can be VERY handy, for example when flattening the luminance across the entire field.

-Noel

Noel Carboni wrote:

 

I get into trouble with everyone when I suggest using a gamma calibration target and using on-monitor and video card controls to get the monitor calibration close to 2.2 gamma, so I probably shouldn't do it.  But hey, it's not absolutely necessary to spend money to get closer to your goal.  It really boils down to how good is good enough for you.  Better color accuracy than what you have now could be a stepping stone.

 

One approach - and I'm not saying it's the best one, but it'll get you closer to your goal without spending money - is to set your monitor to the sRGB preset, set your monitor profile to sRGB IEC61966-2.1 in Windows, then adjust the video driver controls so that the gradients in this target, when displayed at 100% zoom, appear like neutral gray gradients.

Noel "trouble with everyone" no way not possible I'm a bit colorblind calibration hardware for me might be a waste of my money. I've always used Targets IPS LCD edit by the numbers use my wife as final judge and spent my money on a professional Printer that had calibration burnt into it during manufacturing.

I think you may be looking for a simple answer, but none will be forthcoming.

There's really no part of color-management that's "set it and forget it".  It must be understood and to some extent kept in mind to be effective.

I'm not sure what you mean by "no guaranteed results".  There are well-known ways to achieve particular levels of accuracy.  Some of them involve spending money to get more accurate display devices and measurement devices (which are not all created equal either).

It could be pointed out that calibrating and profiling can actually lead to more inconsistent results, with some applications putting up more accurate displays and some less.  Yes, it's true.  People get confused over why their image looks different in different apps all the time.

Regarding accuracy, there really can be no "exact", just accuracy to a measured tolerance level.  We touched on viewing angle, but haven't even begun to talk about how the color rendering on different parts of the monitor may differ (e.g., corners vs. center), or how much a monitor's accuracy may drift according to ambient conditions or degrade over time.  And of course there should be consideration for the ambient lighting in the area of the display...  It just goes deeper and deeper.

When you split hairs, sometimes you find there are a lot of hairs. 

-Noel

Noel Carboni wrote:

 

I think he was more rabid about editing at gamma 1.0 rather than monitor calibration, and all the "evils" it caused to edit in gamma 2.2 space - though I can easily imagine he might have argued that everything would be simpler if it all would just be linear, from image to display.

Timo was a bit of a crackpot but...he did have an impact to a certain degree. When Thomas Knoll worked on Camera Raw, he was mindful of the impact of image processing in a gamma other than 1.0 (linear) particularly for images whose native gamma was linear to start with (like raw files). The fact that the ACR/LR processing pipeline is ProPhoto RGB in a linear gamma (gamma 1.0) wasn't entirely lost on Thomas. There are some image processing routines that are better/easier to do in gamma 1.0. If an image started life with a gamma other than 1.0 linear, Timo tried (and generally failed) to prove it was beneficial to convert to gamma 1.0 before image processing. In the grand scheme of things, that wasn't proven to be true if you are dealing with 8-bit images.

However, if the image processing is being applied to a native linear gamma image, working in linear has some benefits as long as you don't bounce between linear and gamma encoded images. I would be reluctant to attribute this linear way of thinking to Timo...but I think it's accurate to say that Timo did serve a useful purpose in making the engineers look real hard at linear image processing vs. gamma encoded processing. But that's about as far as it went...Timo was an agent for change but it's the engineers that do the work that should get the real credit.

StrongBeaver wrote:

 

As this thread unfolds it seems that "spending money" is the only way to get near or accurate results and to get a LCD monitor calibrated correctly ?

Yes; you get what you pay for. 

Hardware calibration is the best way to bring a monitor to a known state—that's what calibrate means.  You calibrate your monitor and you save the resulting profile in order to set it as your monitor profile.  That's the second phase of calibrating and profiling a monitor.

1.— An accurately calibrated and profiled monitor is the starting point of color management.

2.—You then need a properly tagged image file, i.e, an image file with the embedded profile of the color space in which it was created.

3.—Then you need a color-managed application in which to view that image, in this case Photoshop.  Non-color managed applications won't know how to use your monitor profile or to read the embedded profile in a tagged image file.

Any hardware calibrator will give you superior results to what you can get with software eyeball calibrators.  There are several good ones available in the market.

Google i1 (eye-one), i1 Pro, X-Rite, Spyder, Colormunki, etc.  You'll find a good guide and a good selection here: http://www.tftcentral.co.uk/articles/calibrating.htm

A good introduction to Color Management theory in layman's terms is found here:

http://www.gballard.net/psd/cmstheory.html

Jeff Schewe wrote:

 

Timo was a bit of a crackpot but...he did have an impact to a certain degree.

Timo was an agent for change but it's the engineers that do the work that should get the real credit.

Yes, exactly.  And it shows (positively) in the image quality.

-Noel

StrongBeaver wrote:

 

What is a poor monitor and what is a decent monitor ?

Are you serious? 

Those are hardly scientific terms, but subjective ratings.

A poor quality monitor is something like an LG brand or a ViewSonic monitor.  ($90 to $275-$300)

A very good monitor is an Eizo ($2,000 to $5,000) or an NEC 2690 or 2490 (or whatever their successor models are today) with the SpectraView software ($3,000 or so).

A decent monitor in my mind is something like an NEC MultiSync P221 (around $400).

You could say that a decent monitor for you would be the best one your budget allows.

station_two wrote:

 

A poor quality monitor is something like a ($275-$300)

 

A very good monitor is ($2,000 to $5,000).

 

A decent monitor in my mind is something around $400.

Do you mean you get what you pay for????

If only clients took so much trouble over their computer monitors