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Monitor Calibration Across Multiple Systems…
Hey Creative Cows,
I need to color calibrate three separate systems for consistency at work. We have two 2012 iMacs and a slightly older MacPro with a Cinema HD display. Doing standard calibrations on all three devices gives dramatic differences during QC on the CinemaHD display (improper whites and generally darker images).
Are there any color profiles we should be using on all devices, or are the device-specific profiles improperly calibrated? Has anyone here come across a similar problem?
Any help is greatly appreciated.
Thanks! -
2 Replies
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Hi Kyle,
The best way to calibrate them all to match is to calibrate them to the same working standard. BT.709 as an example with the same gamma and dynamic range. The one thing that can cause descrepencies is the profile selected for the display technology for the particular meter you are using. If you calibrate an LCD CCFL, OLED, and LED LCD with white backlighting, but use the same spectral response offset on the measurment device to calibrate all monitors to BT.709, they won’t look the same. You will need to select the appropriate display technology matched to each display you are calibrating, then calibrate them to the same color space standard, etc.. This will get them as close as possible if not close to imperceptibly the same.
I hope this helps.
JoshJoshua Quain
https://studio.spectracal.com/no-compromise
http://www.spectracal.com -
Ideally what you want is a display that does internal calibration so that you’re not depending on the lower quality calibration produced via curves in the video card. The NEC PA series are quite nice and reasonably priced for this. There’s also a number of Eizo displays that support hardware calibration. And there’s also the HP Dream Color. The other thing these displays enable is they can constrain their gamut to that of Rec. 709 primaries.
Apple Cinema Displays are problematic because there’s no way to independently set white and black luminance, so the dynamic range is something you’re simply stuck with. And that means you’ll need viewing environments that are each slightly different to account for the difference in each display. Further, their gamut isn’t exactly Rec. 709 to begin with. This can be dealt with if the application supports ICC profiles or 3D LUTs to compensate for the display, but of course if the primaries of the display are less chromatic than the standard, there’s simply nothing that can be done to enhance the chroma of a primary.
Dark images on screen implies viewing conditions that are too bright. Improper whites means a white point (color temperature) that hasn’t been properly set. There are a number of products that can help with this, the X-Rite i1 Display Pro is quite a nice instrument for this purpose.
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