Color profiles with photoshop and displays?

technokill

Hey folks!

I've been messing around with digital painting and graphic design for quite a while in photoshop but I never really cared about color profiles.

Recently I color calibrated my macbook pro and that's when the questions started to spring. Also because now I'll also be using photoshop for compositing my renders!

So,

1- regarding color profile and displays, what should I do we the 2nd display attached to my macbook pro? Should I use the same calibration file for the mac's display or should I calibrate and create a new one for the external display?

2- Should I tell photoshop to use the same color profile I created to use with the displays? Or should I set a default worldwide profile, like sRGB 1996?

3- When saving files to work among more than 1 computer, should I embed the color profile I'm currently using or not?

Think that covers all possible scenarios!

Thanks fellas.

Eric Chadwick

Each display needs its own calibration. Even if you have identical brand displays, often they were created with different internal components which can affect calibration.

Photoshop should be setup to use sRGB, and Gray should be set to Gray Gamma 2.2. See [PBR] Physically Based Rendering Bible

Yes, embed color profiles. But also check in your renderer to make sure it is reading and using them, where appropriate. See above link.

kurt_hectic

I load everywhere I can an Adobe1998 profile. I have 4 displays and I calibrate them just to eliminate any major differences between them.

I pick up like 3 different, very colourful images and check how they looks like on each of the screens. Then adjust rgb manually.

technokill

Thanks a lot guys!

So is there a consensus regarding the general use of adobe1998 vs sRGB 1966? Which one should I pick?


And something I'm not quite getting yet is why would we calibrate our screens and then tell photoshop to use a different profile?
Wouldn't that mean different colors, as the viewer would be seeing sRGB instead of the profile I created based on my calibration?

In other words, shouldn't I also use the sRGB as the standard profile for my monitors, to make sure what I see is what the viewer is going to see?

Eric Chadwick

How are you calibrating your monitors?

technokill

Eric Chadwick wrote: »

How are you calibrating your monitors?

Apple and windows built-in calibration tools.

Actually for the macbook display I even got a profile from a guy with the same machine as mine and he used a real expensive calibrator. Turns out my eye-only calibration wasn't so far off at all.

I'm getting pretty reasonable results so far.

carmona87

This built-in tools are a little help, but at the end they're not absolutely reliable, given that you calibrate them "by eye". Our brain will do a balance according to your ambiance (light amount, color temperature, colors around). So it won't be an objective reading of the colors of your screen.

Therefore, if color reliability is really important to you, you need to calibrate with a hardware tool with sensors (colorimeter like Spyder4).