Monitor calibration thoughts/questions

[conrad_hoffman]

So I bought myself a Calibrite Display Plus HL for Christmas, figuring it was time to calibrate. Quickly learning things, but also have some questions. I'm aiming for 100 nits as 120 is too bright for my room and preferences. Aiming for D65 whitepoint.

So I have three ways to do things:

1) Viewsonic Colorbration software to do  hardware calibration. This works well but results in a white point a bit off from specified. Not sure why but I get 6370 when I specify D65. Other software gets much closer, within a few points. IMO, that's enough to notice. (My monitor is a VP2468 that's at least 5 years old. I have a newer 2768 at work that's higher res and seems to cover more of the sRGB gamut, 99% instead of 91-95. The newer one calibrates dead on.)

2) Open source Displaycal to do software calibration. Haven't used this much but it seems more thorough. Can't do hardware though. (needed to load 32 bit version of Argyll, not the 64-bit, or it won't work!) This hasn't been updated since 2019, but Argyll has, so it probably doesn't matter.

3) Calibrite Profiler to do software calibration. This works well and I suspect it has the best interface to the HL, but it can't do hardware.

Need to experiment to decide which way is best. Everything I've read says go with hardware cal, but I don't like the whitepoint.  I think Profiler and Displaycal can give similar, if not identical, results. I see strong and weak points in all the choices! Also need to settle on something and not go crazy with this!

Can anybody offer any education on the best choices?

[conrad_hoffman]

After some experimentation, the best results seem to be hardware calibration using the Viewsonic software. There's some info on this software on the X-Rite site, so I assume they developed it together, at least to some extent. The trick was to set the color space to native, rather than sRGB. Native and sRGB are nearly the same for this monitor. That allowed a whitepoint of 6500K and everything looks correct in terms of grey scale range and the colors of standard test images. I don't think it's visually any different than doing a software calibration entirely in the icc file, but (I think) a hardware calibration will make things look correct even in non-color-managed application like the Window desktop.

Edited January 1 by conrad_hoffman

[hjoseph7]

The Monitor Calibration tool I use is SpectraView II which prompts me to calibrate my monitor every so often(too often). If I was doing a lot of printing, I guess these prompts would come in handy, but since I use my computer for other purposes such as: cooking recipes, youtube videos, The news, sports, various forums, these prompts to calibrate my monitor are very annoying. I guess that when my next printing session comes around, I will calibrate my monitor using Spectra View, but right now I'm not motivated to do so.  When photography become too complicated and technical, then it's not Photography anymore, it's Math.  Sorry I could not be of much help...

[AlanKlein]

3 hours ago, hjoseph7 said:

The Monitor Calibration tool I use is SpectraView II which prompts me to calibrate my monitor every so often(too often). If I was doing a lot of printing, I guess these prompts would come in handy, but since I use my computer for other purposes such as: cooking recipes, youtube videos, The news, sports, various forums, these prompts to calibrate my monitor are very annoying. I guess that when my next printing session comes around, I will calibrate my monitor using Spectra View, but right now I'm not motivated to do so.  When photography become too complicated and technical, then it's not Photography anymore, it's Math.  Sorry I could not be of much help...

I use Spectraview II.  You can change the setting for alerts to recalibrate.  Click Edit tab>Preferences>Calibration> then select Recalibration Reminder Period.  You could select  Never. 

 

 

[paddler4]

18 hours ago, hjoseph7 said:

The Monitor Calibration tool I use is SpectraView II which prompts me to calibrate my monitor every so often(too often). If I was doing a lot of printing, I guess these prompts would come in handy, but since I use my computer for other purposes such as: cooking recipes, youtube videos, The news, sports, various forums, these prompts to calibrate my monitor are very annoying. I guess that when my next printing session comes around, I will calibrate my monitor using Spectra View, but right now I'm not motivated to do so.  When photography become too complicated and technical, then it's not Photography anymore, it's Math.  Sorry I could not be of much help...

Doesn't take any math to recalibrate a monitor. Just a little bit of patience.

I use an X-Rite, but it has the same issue: by default, it prompts  me too early. In the days of CRTs, calibration apparently went off kilter fairly quickly. It doesn't seem to with modern displays, at least the ones I've had. So, I set the software to remind me less often, and then I ignore it until I'm ready to spend the time doing it.

 

[conrad_hoffman]

I set my interval to "never" because my OCD ensures that it will get done more often than necessary no matter what.  Still trying to grasp some things- If I profile a monitor to a smaller gamut than the monitor is capable of, does that profile insure that no colors outside the specified gamut will be displayed? Similarly, if the monitor is close to sRGB but doesn't quite match, is "native" a better choice than "sRGB"?

[paddler4]

20 hours ago, conrad_hoffman said:

I set my interval to "never" because my OCD ensures that it will get done more often than necessary no matter what.  Still trying to grasp some things- If I profile a monitor to a smaller gamut than the monitor is capable of, does that profile insure that no colors outside the specified gamut will be displayed? Similarly, if the monitor is close to sRGB but doesn't quite match, is "native" a better choice than "sRGB"?

I'd post this in the digital darkroom forum. The Dog is the person to give you the best answer. However, not being an expert, I'll take a stab at it:

1. yes

2. I suspect this depends on the monitor, but I would calibrate it to sRGB, which is a standard, unlike the characteristics of your particular monitor.

I use a NEC wide gamut monitor, the same model Dog uses, and NEC advises first calibrating the monitor and then using the full native gamut. I think that's because a printer isn't exactly Adobe RGB, and the idea is to get the best possible rendition and then let the ICC and softproofing narrow it if need be. But really, ask Dog. He's the expert.