PLEASE HELP! I just calibrated my monitor and I am more confused than ever

I am so confused. I just calibrated my monitor with Spyder2 Express and opened several images in my editor,

specifed the monitor profile and my images are so washed out and b&w's look like smurf-ed. I can understand that

using a Lab's ICC profile can have the appearance of washed out images but the monitor profile? I loved my

images before calibrating my monitor and did very little to them before installing the spyder. Now I find I am

having to push tons of contrast and they don't look anywhere near the pre-calibrated version. Is this normal?

What am I doing wrong? I'm using Paint Shop Pro Photo X2. Another dumb question- I assume the spyder profile

functions only in an image editor? My images look one way in PSP and another way in Windows Image and Picture

Viewer.

Calibrating your display is something that happens outside of whatever application happens to display images. You do it to make up for oddities in the display itself, or the video card that's sending a signal to it. What you DON'T want to do is tell your app to use that profile. If you calibrated your display, EVERY app on the machine is already having its display output, as handled by the operating system, rendered through the newly calibrated profile. Unlike your printer's (or lab's), your monitor's profile doesn't need to be specified in order to work. The only thing that needs to know to use your monitor profile is your operating system - and the act of going through the calibration wizard trains your OS to do that.

Go back to telling your editing app to work with the profile associated with the device that will be reproducing the image for output.

"specifed the monitor profile "

DO NOT DO THAT!

Your computer's OS should be runnign the monitor /display profile i nthe background for all ICC aware apllications which has far as I know includes every piece of photo processign software made.

INSTEAD SPECIFY A DEVICE NEUTRAL RGB WORK SPACE TO OPEN YOUR PHOTOS WITH.

Like sRGB (smallest) , Adobe RGB(1998) best all around color space for photogrpahs or if you are workign wit h16 bit per channel philes, Pro Photo.

oh okay. That makes sense and what I thought the spyder should do before I calibrated it and got confused. When I

go to the "color management" tab under file in PSP, the popup window includes 3 selections (each of which

include a drop-down menu with various options): monitor profile, printer profile and emulative device profile. I

assumed that since "monitor profile" was an option and spyder2 was available in the drop-down menu, that I should

select it. Its also available in the emulative device profile. Why are these options there if I shouldn't select

them?