Calibrated and Profiled not necessarily = Correct

I recently discovered that my ony laptop screen, despite being a lovely high-resolution unit and seemingly very bright and coulourful, had a very poor colour gamut. I cannot quantify it but it was way less than sRGB colourspace.

So, despite proper calibration and profiling I was not seeing the right colours and this had caused me to do some editing and shooting practices that were inappropriate.

The most obvious symptom was that when I displayed a shot of a rich red flower I could get the texture or the colour right, but never both at the same time. I had been desaturating the colour or underexposing the shot to overcome ths but it never looked right.

Solution: An Eizo ColorEdge CG241W widescreen LCD monitor. Almost the full Adobe RGB (1998) colour space, high resolution (same 1920x1200 as my laptop), very uniform brightness and colour throughout the screen, and far less (almost none) colour or brightness change visible from anywhere in front of the monitor. That gave me greater viewing pleasure and greater flexibility on where I could view it from.


What confirmed the limitation of the laptop screen was a Microsoft utility called WinColor.exe which shows a 3D representation of any colour profile and allows it to be compared with any other, including the standard colour spaces. My Sony profile gamut was engulfed by sRGB like a golf ball inside a tennis ball. It wasn't even close. When I bought the Sony it seemed like the best screen in the whole shop but looks were deceptive.When I used the same utility to compare the Eizo with the Adobe RGB colour space they were much the same as each other, just as promised by Eizo.

So, check out the colour gamut of your screen before you abandon sensible editing and shooting practices just because your profiled monitor won't let you get good looking prints or otherwise doesn't quite look natural. Colour gamut is an often overlooked but very significant part of achieving effective calibration and profiling of your monitor.

- Alan

Yes, Alan, what you found is not untypical.

The job of a laptop screen is to display information with the least energy use and provide a bright high-contrast saturated image that will "wow" people. For this a large gamut is not needed. However, it will be perfect for spreadsheets, photographs of family and vacations as well as in-flight movies. Dell's display's have been similar issues, at least in the past. Razz-ma-tazz for games trumps color fidelity for may consumers.

There are many 3D programs to demonstrate color gamut and the ability to rotate the projections is helpful since otherwise corners and tails might be overlooked.

In any case, the person "correcting" colors has to always remember that what one sees in even the best screens is really an approximation of the file. It's best imagined as a slightly imperfect window to the color described in the RAW data. So always make the least possible changes to color and be prepared to rework images down the road as we get better monitors and printers.

Even now, printers can deliver colors that we cannot actually map on the screen! What we do see on the LCD display is a perceptual experience of made by reassigning colors.

Obviously, when we have the capability of using a better monitor as the Eizo, then we can take more risks with color correction.

If one has an limited budget, then limit the edits in photoshop as much as possible. Getting the black and white points as well as a simple grey card balance is then the safe conservative approach.

Asher

Hi Alan,

Thanks for the mention. The download is available for free at http://www.microsoft.com/prophoto/downloads/default.aspx, along with other useful stuff. Interestingly, it can show my generated profiles compared with others. The generic Epson printer ones seem rather ambitious.

Best wishes,

Ray