Some help with calibration..~(Pantone Huey)

BengaLover

Bought a basic Pantone Huey - and its calibrated my monitor, with the background of all webpages looking pinkish instead of their previous white..
Screenshot here, does it look not right to you or is it just me - should I rely on this process or what..

ScumLord

Your monitor may have had too much blue to begin with, I know mine did.

Gregor Samsa

Just note that your screenshot won't actually show us what you see on your screen, as the screen shot feature of an OS doesn't use the monitor profile. For instance, I'm not seeing any pink in your whites. I've two monitors. If I span a solid colour across the two and set the profiles of the two monitors differently, I'll see a different colour on each screen. But If I take a screenshot spanning both screens, when I look a the resulting image on mine monitor, the parts from both screens will look the same. How they look will depend on what monitor I'm viewing on.

As ScumLord pointed out, sometimes when you calibrate your monitor, it looks unnatural for a while, as you were so used the way it was. But I'm not familiar with the Pantone Huey (I've a Spider 3 Pro).

BengaLover

I was sure it was something I really needed, but im not really seeing any difference in looking at my pictures..so maybe my current pc monitor which is fairly new was adequate enough..

bullpost

Or you could have a touch of colour blindness

BengaLover wrote: »

I was sure it was something I really needed, but im not really seeing any difference in looking at my pictures..so maybe my current pc monitor which is fairly new was adequate enough..

ScumLord

BengaLover wrote: »

I was sure it was something I really needed, but im not really seeing any difference in looking at my pictures..so maybe my current pc monitor which is fairly new was adequate enough..

It may not be of much of a benefit locally as you'd need to calibrate your printer as well to see proper results. Where it's really necessary is when you send work to someone else like a printing company. They'll print what you send them to a standard and it could end up looking very different from what you see on your screen if your profile is completely different to theirs.

That's why I got the calibration device, something I had printed in a paper looked very different to what I had on screen. I had no comeback either as I had no calibration of my own.

Heebie

If you edited the images on the web-pages before you calibrated, and they look pink after calibration, then you might have had too much cyan (green-blue) coming off your monitor, or too much green. (if it's in the bright highlights, it actually takes someone who's looked at a lot of color editing to determine if something is just a tiny bit red, or a tiny bit magenta..which aren't the same thing... just like really dark yellows look like red to people who haven't seen it a million times.)

it could also be that the monitor color-calibration is not correct.

Have you made up, or found online, a color chart with shades of primary colors, and shades of grey? (steps of 10 tend to work well.)

Creating a chart with grays of:
0,0,0 10,10,10 20,20,20 30,30,30 40,40,40 etc.. 255.255.255. should give you some serious shading.
The the same each with R G and B
0,0,0 10,0,0 20,0,0 30,0,0 40,0,0 etc.. 255,0,0
0,0,0 0,10,0 0,20,0 0,30,0 0,40,0 etc.. 0,255.0
0,0,0 0,0,10 0,0,20 0,0,30 0,0,40 etc.. 0,0,255
and with their opposites, effectively CM and Y
0,0,0 0,10,10 0,20,20 0,30,30 0,40,40 etc.. 0,255.255
0,0,0 10,10,0 20,20,0 30,30,0 40,40,0 etc.. 255,255,0
0,0,0 10,0,10 20,0,20 30,0,30 40,0,40 etc.. 255,0,255

This should give you a really good idea of how your monitor looks... as long as you compare it to a "known good" monitor or output of some sort. (If your monitor is always displaying too much pink, and you're used to that, your brain will compensate for the pink & make it look "normal" to you.. this is why a control that is "known good" is important.)

Another thing that can throw people is that if you calibrate the color for a monitor on one computer, then detach it from that computer and attach it to another, the color profile is probably not right any longer, especially if you're using VGA connectors (which are analogue) The connector's conductivity being slightly different on one computer than it is on another computer will affect the color. (less so on fully digital signals like HDMI or DVI, although even those can be affected, since the digital signals have a "tolerance" level before which the error-correction will kick in.)

Creating an image like I mentioned above gives you a "virtual" control.. you know it *SHOULD* be perfect shades of all 3 primary colors, their polar opposite, and grey..

Having the angle of your calibration device not quite right, or if it has settings for LCD vs CRT and you choose the wrong one etc.. can make a big difference as well.. and if you didn't have the brightness & contrast set the way the calibration device expects it, that can throw it off, so be sure to follow all the directions. (most will want the contrast as high as possible, and the brightness to a particular point.)

and whatever you do, don't also use a built-in color calibration thing, nor use the adjustments for you video card etc.. (nVidia has a control panel where you can adjust brightness, saturation, gamma etc.. independently for each monitor and such.. but using it will just screw up your calibrator.)

If you have a machine that can dynamically adjust the brightness & contrast to adjust for the ambient light in the room, you should shut it off.