monitor calibration, gamma setting

(originally posted in comp.graphics.apps.photoshop, re-posted here)

Hello all,
I am editing my photos on a laptop (yes, I know that a laptop screen is suboptimal for this), presenting them on a LCD TV screen (Sony KDL-32EX402) and some of them are to be printed on an inkjet printer or a commercial printing service.

I experienced that most jpegs coming from cameras are displayed satisfactory on the laptop as well as on the TV, and also on printouts.

But the best pictures come from high contrast photos (such as back-light or dawn). I shoot them in RAW and reduce the high contrast by editing them on the laptop. These photos either look well on the laptop but are much too bright on the TV or are OK on the TV and much too dark on the laptop.
I purchased a colorimeter (Spyder 3 Elite) and started calibrating the monitors (both the laptop and the TV). I found that using the default Spyder 3 setting of gamma 2.2 for the monitor does not solve the problem. If I set gamma to 1.4 in Spyder 3, the photos are looking quite similar on the laptop and the TV, but now they are looking too dark on other PCs. (I did not yet test printout of these photos.)

Now my question: Which gamma setting in Spyder 3 is preferable for calibrating the laptop monitor?
Or, how can I achieve good results on the TV as well as on printouts?

Thanks for any hints,
--
Wilfried Hennings
please reply in the newsgroup, the e-mail address is invalid

Hi,

I have bit of experience with Color Munki but the idea for profile adjustment is the same. Gamma of 2.2 is recommended these days for all calibration. You may see comments about setting gamma to 1.8 for Macintosh but that was due to a quirk in printing many years ago. Mac people generally set color temperature to 5000K vs. 6500 for Windows. This is not really significant, especially for the issue you presented. I assume you are driving the TV from the laptop. You have created <two> profiles, one for the laptop display and one for the TV. Be sure you switch the color profiles to match the laptop or TV as needed.

There will be color gamut differences too, But that is a secondary issue here.

Good luck!

Paul Simon

"Wilfried" wrote in message

(originally posted in comp.graphics.apps.photoshop, re-posted here)
Hello all,
I am editing my photos on a laptop (yes, I know that a laptop screen is suboptimal for this), presenting them on a LCD TV screen (Sony KDL-32EX402) and some of them are to be printed on an inkjet printer or a commercial printing service.

I experienced that most jpegs coming from cameras are displayed satisfactory on the laptop as well as on the TV, and also on printouts.
But the best pictures come from high contrast photos (such as back-light or dawn). I shoot them in RAW and reduce the high contrast by editing them on the laptop. These photos either look well on the laptop but are much too bright on the TV or are OK on the TV and much too dark on the laptop.
I purchased a colorimeter (Spyder 3 Elite) and started calibrating the monitors (both the laptop and the TV). I found that using the default Spyder 3 setting of gamma 2.2 for the monitor does not solve the problem. If I set gamma to 1.4 in Spyder 3, the photos are looking quite similar on the laptop and the TV, but now they are looking too dark on other PCs. (I did not yet test printout of these photos.)
Now my question: Which gamma setting in Spyder 3 is preferable for calibrating the laptop monitor?
Or, how can I achieve good results on the TV as well as on printouts?
Thanks for any hints,
--
Wilfried Hennings
please reply in the newsgroup, the e-mail address is invalid

Hello,
and thank you for the reply.

"Paul Simon" wrote:

I have bit of experience with Color Munki but the idea for profile adjustment is the same. Gamma of 2.2 is recommended these days for all calibration. You may see comments about setting gamma to 1.8 for Macintosh but that was due to a quirk in printing many years ago. Mac people generally set color temperature to 5000K vs. 6500 for Windows. This is not really significant, especially for the issue you presented. I assume you are driving the TV from the laptop. You have created <two> profiles, one for the laptop display and one for the TV. Be sure you switch the color profiles to match the laptop or TV as needed.

I CAN drive the TV from the laptop, but usually I don't. I plug my usb memory stick either directly in the usb port of the TV or in the usb port of the digital satellite receiver which is connected to the TV by HDMI.
Playback of the test files from the Spyder 3 test DVD via the DVD player (also connected via HDMI) gives good results,
but it seems that display of jpeg files via the TV's as well as the SatRec's usb port is bad. (Most time I use the SatRec because the TV displays the jpeg files in arbitrary order while the SatRec displays them sorted by file name.)
Meanwhile I downloaded several test pictures from the internet, especially one which displays a grayscale in fine steps. Displayed via the TV usb port, the last three gray levels at the white end of the scale are indistinguishable, while the dark end grays are much too bright.
Displayed via the SatRec usb port, three gray levels at each the dark and the white end are indistinguishable.
Adjusting TV's brightness and contrast does not help in both cases, it only affects the middle tones.

I will try whether driving the TV from the laptop gives better results, but I wonder why most unedited pictures from several digicams are displayed well via the SatRec's usb port while those test pictures and the edited pictures are not.

There will be color gamut differences too, But that is a secondary issue here.

Good luck!

Paul Simon

"Wilfried" wrote in message

(originally posted in comp.graphics.apps.photoshop, re-posted here)
Hello all,
I am editing my photos on a laptop (yes, I know that a laptop screen is suboptimal for this), presenting them on a LCD TV screen (Sony KDL-32EX402) and some of them are to be printed on an inkjet printer or a commercial printing service.

I experienced that most jpegs coming from cameras are displayed satisfactory on the laptop as well as on the TV, and also on printouts.
But the best pictures come from high contrast photos (such as back-light or dawn). I shoot them in RAW and reduce the high contrast by editing them on the laptop. These photos either look well on the laptop but are much too bright on the TV or are OK on the TV and much too dark on the laptop.
I purchased a colorimeter (Spyder 3 Elite) and started calibrating the monitors (both the laptop and the TV). I found that using the default Spyder 3 setting of gamma 2.2 for the monitor does not solve the problem. If I set gamma to 1.4 in Spyder 3, the photos are looking quite similar on the laptop and the TV, but now they are looking too dark on other PCs. (I did not yet test printout of these photos.)
Now my question: Which gamma setting in Spyder 3 is preferable for calibrating the laptop monitor?
Or, how can I achieve good results on the TV as well as on printouts?
Thanks for any hints,
--
Wilfried Hennings
please reply in the newsgroup, the e-mail address is invalid

--
Wilfried Hennings
bitte in der Newsgruppe antworten, die Mailadresse ist ungültig

All that calibration does is translate colors from one color managed device to another for a SPECIFIC purpose.
Profiling your monitor, laptop or otherwise, will not create an image that looks the same on any electronic display or media such as paper. Profiling/calibrating an HDTV attempts to make that screen reproduce a gamut that is consistent with the standard for digital television but has nothing at all to do with Photoshop style monitor calibration for printing. The reason calibration is desirable and works for printing with e.g. Photoshop is that the colors displayed on your monitor by the calibration software during the calibration process have a specific RGB value. Photoshop can then shift your processed image toward whatever color bias your monitor inherently possesses when you do color managed printing. Rather than gamut, particularly for printing, the key consideration is screen brightness: all LCD screens, regardless of technology, are inherently very much brighter than even glossy inkjet paper. Unless you are able to turn your monitors brightness down to a value of around 90 for calibration your prints will usually look dark. IPS panels are more desirable than the typical technology used in notebooks and most consumer flat screen monitors for color managed image processing as they are more able to have their brightness turned down while maintaining color gamut (you get what you pay for with a dedicated graphic arts monitors).
You will require different "profiles" depending on the end use for your image. With a minimal of experimentation you should be able to identify a simple tweak to brightness and contrast that you can mechanically apply so that your image will display adequately on a specific display device. However if you are using a laptop you are using the absolute worst monitor possible for image processing.

You will require different "profiles" depending on the end use for your image. With a minimal of experimentation you should be able to identify a simple tweak to brightness and contrast that you can mechanically apply so that your image will display adequately on a specific display device. However if you are using a laptop you are using the absolute worst monitor possible for image processing.

Thank you for clearing up an old question
been using a laptop for photoshop and had color
and resolution problems
so now will transfer my files to the desktop and use
photoshop there
Ulysses

Hello and thanks to all replies.

"bmocc" wrote:

[...]
You will require different "profiles" depending on the end use for your image.

As far as I understand, the purpose of color (icc) profiling is to display and print an image on all devices as identical as possible, so that there is no need to produce a different image for each output device.

However if you are using a laptop you are using the absolute worst monitor possible for image processing.

Although this is true, it turned out that my TV and SatRec are even worse.

The (partial) solution of my problem was given as a reply to my question in http://www.dslr-forum.de/showthread.php?t=1036702

I summarize the results:
- Run the calibration with gamma=2.2, save the monitor profile and set it as default monitor profile in Windows.
- Photoshop Elements (PSE) already uses the current monitor profile, but be sure that the output color profile is set to sRGB. - Activate color profile in IrfanView to display the image similar as in PSE.

Now the bad news: My TV and SatRec do not interpret a color profile in the jpeg file.
However they display the contents roughly like sRGB, with the exception that a small range of low brightness colors are displayed as black and high brightness colors are displayed as white (color clipping). Nevertheless the pictures now look approximately the same on the TV as on the laptop.

--
Wilfried Hennings
please reply in the newsgroup, the e-mail address is invalid