If I use the eye dropper in PS CS2 (when the image is in srgb color space) it verifies 0R 0G 255B (well...it says 254B for some reason) even though it looks purple. When I open the image in lightroom (where it looks purple too), it says 41.1%R 18.3%G and 93.8%B
I'm so very confused :cry
My guess is you have double profiling where you have two separate processes correcting for your monitor profile. When you use color-managed software, you get double correcting, when you don't use color-managed software, you get a single correction and it looks right. If this is the case, the solution here is to get rid of the double profiling, not to turn off Photoshop's profiling.
Are you on XP or Vista? Do you have an LCD monitor or CRT monitor?
Can you look in your startup sequence and make sure that Adobe Gamma is not set to run? Is anything else running there that might have something to do with color or your monitor?
What kind of video card do you have? Do you have software in your startup sequence that comes with your video card that is loading? Is there are control panel app for your video card?
My guess is you have double profiling where you have two separate processes correcting for your monitor profile. When you use color-managed software, you get double correcting, when you don't use color-managed software, you get a single correction and it looks right. If this is the case, the solution here is to get rid of the double profiling, not to turn off Photoshop's profiling.
Are you on XP or Vista? Do you have an LCD monitor or CRT monitor?
Can you look in your startup sequence and make sure that Adobe Gamma is not set to run? Is anything else running there that might have something to do with color or your monitor?
What kind of video card do you have? Do you have software in your startup sequence that comes with your video card that is loading? Is there are control panel app for your video card?
I'm on Vista Business 32-bit. It's a laptop, but the screen is an S-IPS lcd. Video card is an ATI V5200. The ATI control center is currently set to deactivate ATI color controls and I don't have adobe gamma in the startup.
What's wrong is that's not how ICC aware and non ICC aware applications work:
ICC Aware application. Examine the display profile and the document profile. Use Display Using Monitor Compensation to produce correct previews of numbers. This requires two profiles: Document and Display.
Non ICC Aware application. Send RGB numbers to the display. Application doesn't know the color space of the image (it sends the numbers without Display Using Monitor Compensation) nor does it see or understand the display profile. NO profiles being used.
There is a color look up table that's loaded by the profile and non ICC aware applications ARE affected in just these current settings and their effect on the display. But they don't understand the profiles in any other way. The previews are incorrect.
for sRGB images though shouldn't the LUT and profile loader on startup be all you need? It seems strange to me that IE or irfanview show simple sRGB profile jpgs differently than say CS4.
When the LUT table gets loaded in it does very much change how pictures look in IE and irfanview (grayscales, etc. everything look much better and gamma along the whole ramp changes, etc.) so shouldn't sRGB pics look fine in them since isn't the LUT supposed to matching sRGB to my monitor? And isn't the whole point of the loading up the profile to make the gamma and white point and color balance of my monitor closer to the exact sRGB
I know they wont make adobergb and non-sRGB stuff look right in non-ICC aware programs, but shouldn't sRGB pics display the same way in any program??
and waht is most bizarre is this:
and why would loading the LUT and then removing the monitor in windows color mangement profile before loading CS4 -OR- not loading the LUT at startup but leaving the monitor profile associated with the monitor make CS4 display things in the exact same way? Doesn't that imply that the LUT laoding at startup does the EXACT same thing CS4 does itself when it gets informed by windows that there is an ICC profile assigned to the monitor and it decides to take that into account itself?
And isn't using both then double profile? I.E. CS4 say does sRGB->Monitor Profile and then the video card has the sRGB->Monitor Profile loaded into it and it gets fed the monitor profiled info from CS4 thinking it is sRGB and then it applies the transform again? THis really really seems to be what is happening, since if I apply the transform twice it looks just like what CS4 shows when I load the LUT at start and windows informs it about a monitor profile.
and using just the LUT at start OR just having windows tell CS4 about the minitor profile but not both not only both make CS4 do the exact same thing but both make it show sRGB jpg files exactly the way that irfanview does if I have the LUT loaded into the video card. and again when I leave everything set then colro-managed stuff looks different, but oddly enough in EXACTLY the same way as if the LUT and matrix transform loaded into the video card where to be applied to data and then again applied to that data....
leaving the LUT loading and the profile assigned seems to do very much what it seems doing about twice of everything the LUT alone did.
I thought the LUT profile loader applied a matrix transform (as well as additionally adjustments for those that also have a LUT) in the graphics card which transforms from say sRGB primaries to what the actually are on the monitor, no? Isn't that jsut what gets done when you load the profile with the LUT loader? Why do you need CS4 to take advantage of that?
I thought ICC savvy for color-aware programs only meant they could ahndle adobeRGB, ProPhotoRGB and other non-sRGB spaces in additon to the sRGB that everything else can handle fine.
when I do load the LUT at start and do leave the profile coloreyes made assigned to the monitor photoshop alters the colors a bit AND even makes shadows a bit brighter compared to irfanview.... and it just seems very surprising that loading the LUT alone or just having it apply the profile alone should make it render with, as far as I can tell, the EXACT same look, why in the world should those two things end up shifting things the exact same way if they really are doing different things?
and if CS4 is not ending up with double profiles applied then why do prints that i make in CS4 look a lot more like the images shown in irfanview (or CS4 with only LUT or profile but not both)?
I also noted as did the OP that if I set proofing on and use sRGB as the workspace and set the target as my monitor profile then colors look exactly as they do in irfanview and such.
It does not. There are two operations going on. One is a LUT in the profile being applied which does control what you see in both ICC and non ICC aware applications (note, its often best for all but the high end LCD's to be calibrated such that this LUT is doing as little as possible since all you gain is banding using only 8-bits).
ICC aware applications care about what the profile tells it about the state of the display, LUT not withstanding. In fact that's HOW we can produce proper color appearance in ICC aware applications without altering the display with a LUT. The compensation is happening at 21 bit precision using the Adobe Color Engine (ACE). None of this is happening outside an ICC aware application.
but if the LUT loaded into a graphics card is doing its best to account from how the monitor differs from sRGB and if a color-aware program looking at the monitor profile does it's best to shift colors as they need be to give the right color on teh monitor to match the sRGB color and then if that gets sent to the card which is already using the LUT why does this not give double profiling?
Note that when I don't use the LUT loader but do have the monitor assigned in windows color management that the prints CS4 makes look closer than what CS4 shows when I also load the LUT as well and that loading one or the other makes CS4 show images the EXACT same way and that having both set at once appears to just shift colors and brightness by twice the amount as having only set at once.
so why does not imply that color-aware programs end up doing double profiling under windows vista when the LUT is also loaded at startup??
Ok, I found my color profiler (i1 Display 2). Installed the latest software and drivers, ran it, profiled the monitor, and still everything looks good except in PS CS2. In PS, if srgb is the color space, 0r 0g 0b looks purple instead of blue. If I set the profile as the color space, things look like they are supposed to. Ideas?
same here (although I should note that what we think of blue primary actually is a bit more like what most people are used to calling purplish)
but that said I do notice a shift towards purple, twice as large when I use both the LUT and leave monitor profile assigned
My guess is you have double profiling where you have two separate processes correcting for your monitor profile. When you use color-managed software, you get double correcting, when you don't use color-managed software, you get a single correction and it looks right. If this is the case, the solution here is to get rid of the double profiling, not to turn off Photoshop's profiling.
Are you on XP or Vista? Do you have an LCD monitor or CRT monitor?
Can you look in your startup sequence and make sure that Adobe Gamma is not set to run? Is anything else running there that might have something to do with color or your monitor?
What kind of video card do you have? Do you have software in your startup sequence that comes with your video card that is loading? Is there are control panel app for your video card?
see this is what I think too
everyone tells me no always trust CS4 and yes you msut have the software that profiled your machine use the LUT loader at start but i could swear this results in double profiling under Vista (or at least vista plus ATI graphics card that supports LUT and matrix)
and i see so many people talk abotu this and then decided that colro-managed stuff understands things so it must be correct and other stuff is wrong but I think it is the color-managed stuff that is wrong when you use a LUT loader since I think you get double profiling and I think tons of people are going around making messed up images since nobody seems to have looked into it enough to start thinking that it actualy might be double profiling.
I'm on Vista Business 32-bit. It's a laptop, but the screen is an S-IPS lcd. Video card is an ATI V5200. The ATI control center is currently set to deactivate ATI color controls and I don't have adobe gamma in the startup.
tell me what happens when you do this:
bootup machine as normal (make sure you have the profile your profiling software made assigned to the monitor under vista color management!) with your LUT loading loading the profiel globally to the video card and then AFTER that has finished go to vista colro management again and uncheck the box (or maybe check it) whatever it is that makes it do the remove these settings from current monitor to get rid of the association of the profile with the monitor and THEN load CS2 (oh and make sure just for this simple test to have earlier set CS2 workspace to sRGB and to have turned off proofing) and then load an sRGB jpg int CS2 and tell how it looks then....
doing this, and only doing this, appears to make non-aware programs show sRGB files correctly AND colro-aware programs show sRGB as well as any other sort of colorspaced file show correctly. Anything else I do either makes non-aware stuff show uncalibrated colors and aware stuff work great or aware stuff appear to be using double monitor profiling and unaware stuff show sRGB stuff correctly. (well also I found that setting proof to my monitor also works, but just for CS4 and at that ONYL if the workspace is sRGB but not everyone really necessarily wants the workspae to be sRGB so i don't find this a great solution since I like to use ProPhotRGB as the workspace and many people like to use AdobeRGB)
for sRGB images though shouldn't the LUT and profile loader on startup be all you need? It seems strange to me that IE or irfanview show simple sRGB profile jpgs differently than say CS4.
IE and that other app (which I don't use) are not color managed. That's key. 255G/0R/0B is not the same color in sRGB as it is in Adobe RGB (1998). Non ICC aware applications don't know that since they have no idea what sRGB nor Adobe RGB nor any other color space is (they are ICC unaware). All they "see" is 255G/R0/B0 and send that to the screen (though the graphic system).
There's more to all this than just having a display profile (does the application know what to do with this profile? In non ICC aware applications, not at all).
When the LUT table gets loaded in it does very much change how pictures look in IE and irfanview (grayscales, etc. everything look much better and gamma along the whole ramp changes, etc.) so shouldn't sRGB pics look fine in them since isn't the LUT supposed to matching sRGB to my monitor?
Nope, not enough info to do the full job. What's missing is the Display Using Monitor Compensation architecture in ICC aware applications which looks at the data from the document taking account of its color space and building a document specific preview conversion for that space WITH the display profile. IE and that other app simply don't do that.
And isn't the whole point of the loading up the profile to make the gamma and white point and color balance of my monitor closer to the exact sRGB
Not at all! And you don't have an sRGB display unless you're running a circa 1993 CRT with P22 Phosphors . The sRGB color space is a theoretical color space based on an emissive display who's specifications (down to the ambient light this theoretical display resides in), are a set of simple mathematical spec's (gamma, white point and primary chromaticity of the phosphors in this case).
IE and that other app (which I don't use) are not color managed. That's key. 255G/0R/0B is not the same color in sRGB as it is in Adobe RGB (1998). Non ICC aware applications don't know that since they have no idea what sRGB nor Adobe RGB nor any other color space is (they are ICC unaware). All they "see" is 255G/R0/B0 and send that to the screen (though the graphic system).
There's more to all this than just having a display profile (does the application know what to do with this profile? In non ICC aware applications, not at all).
Nope, not enough info to do the full job. What's missing is the Display Using Monitor Compensation architecture in ICC aware applications which looks at the data from the document taking account of its color space and building a document specific preview conversion for that space WITH the display profile. IE and that other app simply don't do that.
Not at all! And you don't have an sRGB display unless you're running a circa 1993 CRT with P22 Phosphors . The sRGB color space is a theoretical color space based on an emissive display who's specifications (down to the ambient light this theoretical display resides in), are a set of simple mathematical spec's (gamma, white point and primary chromaticity of the phosphors in this case).
yeah i know 0,34,56 in sRGB is not the same as 0,34,56 in AdobeRGB and unless my LCD is exactly sRGB then 0,34,56 RGB on it is not likely to be 0,34,56 in sRGB.
that is not the issue
i'm not expecting non-color managed stuff to ever display adobergb or prophoto or any of that stuff properly
and i'm not expecting my monitor, BEFORE profiling, to display sRGB properly, but shouldn't loading the LUT and/or matrix conversion into my gfx card then make my vid card adjust anything sent to it as sRGB to display properly on my monitor?
and the problem is that color-managed stuff on windows vista appears to convert whatever profile the pic is in to Monitor Profile but when the LUT is loaded into the video card it is already doing an sRGB->Monitor Profile so it is getting the output that has already been converted to monitor profile and then treating that as sRGB and then converting it again, at least this is what it really, really looks like is happening.
and i'm not expecting my monitor, BEFORE profiling, to display sRGB properly, but shouldn't loading the LUT and/or matrix conversion into my gfx card then make my vid card adjust anything sent to it as sRGB to display properly on my monitor?
No. Because the application doesn't know the document is in sRGB or for that matter what sRGB is.
Color managed application can only be color managed with certain info:
1. What are the RGB numbers? (lets stick to one color model although it doesn't matter).
2. What are the scale of the numbers (what color space)?
3. What's the color space of the display?
Convert sRGB to display RGB for preview purposes (Display Using Monitor Compensation).
yeah i know 0,34,56 in sRGB is not the same as 0,34,56 in AdobeRGB and unless my LCD is exactly sRGB then 0,34,56 RGB on it is not likely to be 0,34,56 in sRGB.
that is not the issue
i'm not expecting non-color managed stuff to ever display adobergb or prophoto or any of that stuff properly
and i'm not expecting my monitor, BEFORE profiling, to display sRGB properly, but shouldn't loading the LUT and/or matrix conversion into my gfx card then make my vid card adjust anything sent to it as sRGB to display properly on my monitor?
and the problem is that color-managed stuff on windows vista appears to convert whatever profile the pic is in to Monitor Profile but when the LUT is loaded into the video card it is already doing an sRGB->Monitor Profile so it is getting the output that has already been converted to monitor profile and then treating that as sRGB and then converting it again, at least this is what it really, really looks like is happening.
I'm piping in here only because I went through the same process you are. When I first started calibrating my monitor, I thought that calibrating my monitor meant that it was going to make my monitor work like sRGB and therefore even non-color-managed apps should work OK if given sRGB input. As it turns out, that is just not the case. Let me repeat, that is just not the case and you shouldn't be trying to make it be that with LUT loaders and all that.
The calibration software may tweak some parameters on the monitor, but particularly with LCDs, it is NOT trying to change the monitor to simulate sRGB. It's main purpose in life is to create the monitor profile which describes how the monitor behaves, it does not change the monitor's behavior for non-color-managed apps.
The monitor profile can then be read by color-managed software to accurately display colors on the monitor. You HAVE to give up the notion that non-color-managed software is going to do anything accurate for you. It just isn't. With Firefox3 and Safari both having color management capabilities now, you can pretty much give up using or relying on non-color-managed software.
Further, given that many new LCD monitors are capable of displaying a color gamut that is greater than sRGB, if you somehow made the monitor into an sRGB monitor, you'd be throwing away all that new display capability.
So, anyway I got a system that works properly when I just stopped relying on any color display from non-color-managed apps. It will be off. Ironically with today's wide gamut monitors, it's off even more than it used to be. But, more and more apps are color-managed so just stick with the color-managed world and don't try to force your monitor to be like sRGB and you can make it all work fine.
I'm piping in here only because I went through the same process you are. When I first started calibrating my monitor, I thought that calibrating my monitor meant that it was going to make my monitor work like sRGB and therefore even non-color-managed apps should work OK if given sRGB input. As it turns out, that is just not the case. Let me repeat, that is just not the case and you shouldn't be trying to make it be that with LUT loaders and all that.
[..]
John, another good explanation, which if read *before* and in conjunction with, Andrew's detailed information in this thread, really answers all the points raised.
yeah i know 0,34,56 in sRGB is not the same as 0,34,56 in AdobeRGB and unless my LCD is exactly sRGB then 0,34,56 RGB on it is not likely to be 0,34,56 in sRGB.
that is not the issue
i'm not expecting non-color managed stuff to ever display adobergb or prophoto or any of that stuff properly
and i'm not expecting my monitor, BEFORE profiling, to display sRGB properly, but shouldn't loading the LUT and/or matrix conversion into my gfx card then make my vid card adjust anything sent to it as sRGB to display properly on my monitor?
and the problem is that color-managed stuff on windows vista appears to convert whatever profile the pic is in to Monitor Profile but when the LUT is loaded into the video card it is already doing an sRGB->Monitor Profile so it is getting the output that has already been converted to monitor profile and then treating that as sRGB and then converting it again, at least this is what it really, really looks like is happening.
ok so everything i had been hinting at was WRONG
i had gotten led astray by an almost unique coincidence where the picture I was examining happend by pure chance to have waht the LUT did to it and what the monitor profile each seperately be nearly the same and by the fact that the monitor profile for my monitor seems to not be quite correct in the second stage.
but for those who have run into similar confusions
and since there is tons of variously conflicting stuff posted all over the net much wrong to varying degrees and to make up the mess of wrong stuff I myself posted earlier....
to sum up:
Monitor Profiles have two parts:
part1:
LUT loaders only set things so that gamma and color balance for a certain selected color temperature are displayed properly and DO NOT apply a transformation to the monitor's color space. Monitors vary in how closey they can be adusted by monitors knobs to exact sRGB color space (ones that have a full CMS can often be adjusted exceedinyl close, those without a full CMS usually have the green primary somewhat off and sometimes the primary intensities off as well, usually too saturated and hot)
part 2:
there is a second part to a monitor profile, the first part gets loaded into teh LUT above (and MUST be loaded for the rest of the monitor profile to make sense, when peopel say to remove AdobeGamma and LUT loaders they only mean to remove ones that did not come with your color profiling package you still MUST run the one that your profiling package made or if you use a different once insure that it loads the proper profile), but the second part is the transformation into the monitor color space. It accounts for the actual position of the monitor gamut's primary locations and intensities. Some color profiling programs onyl correct for this and just apply a simple matrix transform others at least appear to do more and perhaps use some sort of long color table to also try to adjust for an non-uniformities within the monitor's gamut (not sure if this is true, but it seems like some more advanced progams such as coloreyes do produce this a more advanced type of monitor profile that goes this extra step).
Programs for viewing:
there appear to be four sorts
1. completely non-color managed
these WILL take advantage of what the LUT loader did so they will at least display pics with the more or less proper gamma setting and color balance temperature (but only if you did make sure to have the LUT loader load the correct profile for your monitor at the start). They will not transform into your monitor's actual color space and pay no attention to teh second part of the color profile mentioned above so they will NOT display pictures entirely correctly on your monitor unless it has a full CMS and was carefull adjusted internally. But sRGB pics should still look at least vaguely and perhaps very, very closely to how they should. Pictures in other formats such as adobergb or prophotorgb will be displayed COMPLETELY wrong since these programs do no do a photo color space to sRGB transform (not a photo color space to monitor color space transform)
example programs appear to be the windows desktop and Internet Explorer
2. partially managed type A
these know how read the ICC profile in a PHOTO so they can adjust for photos using adobeRGB or pro2photo or whatnot, however they convert them to sRGB colorspace and then send to the graphics card they DO NOT know how to read the monitor profile and convert to monitor color space. But at least all pictures should look within some at least semi-reasonable ballpark.
an example is irfanview (IF you turn on color management)
3. partially managed type B
they onyl understand sRGB pics but can transform them to monitor color space
all pics viewed with these that are in sRGB format will look perfect and exactly match CS4 and the like but anything in a different format such as adobergb, etc. will be wrong
4. fully color managed programs
these read the ICC profile in pictures and so can properly work with a picture in any format that it knows how to convert from and as well they also understand monitor profiles so they can convert not just to sRGB for viewing but to the monitor's actual color gamut (note that if the profiling was done with a program that creates a LUT for a gfx card you must first load that in for this to work properly)
basically anything you toss at them should be displayed as correctly as the quality of your monitor and the monitor profile and LUT make possible, everything should look extremely much as it should in all cases
a few examples are CS4, CS3, CS2, Photomechanic
some possible other examples are perhaps firefox if you go in and set all of things that need to be set properly, maybe safari (but apparently there are many ways in which it can fail ro fail if things are not all set correctly and it's not to be trusted, although the comment i read on this was from soem while back and may no longer apply)
wrap up:
the dual-stage monitor profiles explain why loading the LUT in is NOT enough for proper colors
the four types of program awareness explain why even if you do have the proper profile loaded into the LUT various programs will displays pictures differently, EVEN pictures just using the plain old simple sRGB that all programs understand.
final note: on profiles gone bad:
sometimes profiles are not made correctly and if the first stage goes wrong the monitor will not measure to the proper gamma and/or colro temperature and if the second stage goes wrong (as appears to have happened to me a bit, whcih further led to my initial confusion) the monitor gamut will not be corrected for entirely properly and this means anything from you'd have been better off without using it and colro managed programs of type 3 and 4 will actually do worse than type 2 or they will do better but not as much better as they could.
--
Nope, only two. Color managed or non color managed.
thanks
well irfanview says that it does look at picture ICC profiles and DOES use them (if you tell it to in preferences) but it merely converts them to sRGB and DOES NOT use the monitor profile. So this does seem to be program of type 2. It may be the only such program. As for type 3, you may be correct, I haven't found any examples yet.
So I think correct would be most programs are not color managed, some such as CS4 and Firefox with the setting set are, and then there is one oddball, irfanview, that can translate various image profiles into sRGB but that is as far as it goes (I haven't tried this yet to see if it is true or not but this is what they claim on the irfanview site).
anyway, yeah, you are all correct, the last three psots there above mine explain it all too, I was very wrong to think simply having the the LUT loader load in the LUT did everything.
But I still have a weird issue and it is next the next message:
my remaining issue appears to be with how the color-managed apps are handling the monitor profile or some setting I have wrong in vista or how my profiling program is making the second stage of the monitor profile:
So I have my profiling program's LUT loader load the LUT at the start.
If I go and use something like Color HFCR to measure the gamma curve and the gray-scale color temp scale these now look VERY good, far better than without the LUT loaded. So the profiler did a good job in making the LUT and it is being loaded in properly. All is good with that.
What is not good is what happens in my color-managed apps since if I use color hfcr to measure the primaries for say sRGB as displayed in say CS4 they do not line up well on the CIE plot to the sRGB primaries and actually line up much less well than they do if I display them in a non-color managed app. Also the blue primary, even visually, looks rather far towards purple indeed in CS4 (and interestingly is a similar color to the water in the tank with the jellyfish the pic that got me noticing all this to begin with). I know the sRGB blue primary DOES look a bit toward purple compared to what we are used to thinking of as blue, but this looks totally out and out purple.
Anyway viewing colors bars in various programs and measuring them (using ColorEyes probe and colorhcfr program to make these plots) and all of these assume the LUT was loaded (not that it really affects the primaries anyway though):
this is how they measured using a non-monitor profile aware program (not too bad really):
this is how they measured using the color-aware photomechanic with management turned on (worse):
this is how they measured using the color-aware CS4 (even worse still):
CS4 had the workingspace set to sRGB and no-proofing (if I turn on proofing and set target as my monitor then they look like what the non-aware program did, more or less, which I guess makes sense).
and here is one set of color bars i used in reduced size for easy posting (i also used some full screen per color ones froma different source and the results are more or less the same as above):
so what is going on here?
is the profiler making a bad second stage profile?
do i have something set wrong in vista?
should i not be using these as the color bars?
The monitor profile can then be read by color-managed software to accurately display colors on the monitor. You HAVE to give up the notion that non-color-managed software is going to do anything accurate for you. It just isn't.
See, I get that, but the question is why is it actually being accurate and the color-managed stuff being grossly inaccurate, and I think the answer is in this double-proofing stuff, if only I could figure out how to make it stop.
See, I get that, but the question is why is it actually being accurate and the color-managed stuff being grossly inaccurate, and I think the answer is in this double-proofing stuff, if only I could figure out how to make it stop.
i'm not so sure it is double profiling anymore.
my jellyfish pick made it seem exactly like it was that, but now looking at other pictures it does not seem to be the case (at least for me) since I see that the LUT load alone or the monitor profile in a color aware program alone, for almost all pics, make very different adjustments and the monitor profile adjustments are usually much smaller in degree (that one picture I had was a weird coincidence it seems where both those things appeared to do the same thing to the same degree).
but in the end, I do seem to be getting the color-aware programs actually making the colors worse (and I think not matching my prints as well but i need to check again to be sure now). They sure do seem to give a big purple push on the blue primary for one. I can't figure out why. Also note that on the CIE plots you can even see the purple push on the blue primary.
Hmm I didn't sell of my spyder yet, when I get back to my other place I can do a profile with the spyder software and see what happens. That might help give some more clues.
See, I get that, but the question is why is it actually being accurate and the color-managed stuff being grossly inaccurate, and I think the answer is in this double-proofing stuff, if only I could figure out how to make it stop.
My guess, just a guess because I know nothing about your software, is that the monitor profile was created assuming no LUT load. Thus, when you do the LUT load and then the color-managed software comes along and attempts to manage for the monitor profile, you get double correction and things look horrible. One could test this out by not doing the LUT load and seeing if the color-managed software looks accurate. There are some situations where you should not do a LUT load as that just restricts what the monitor can produce and can generate banding and other undesirable characteristics. There are cases where you will get the best performance in color-managed apps without LUT load.
If you insist on LUT load, then you should load the LUT and then profile your monitor with the LUT loaded so you create a monitor profile that describes your monitor when the LUT is loaded. Then, the color-managed apps can correct to the right thing.
My guess, just a guess because I know nothing about your software, is that the monitor profile was created assuming no LUT load. Thus, when you do the LUT load and then the color-managed software comes along and attempts to manage for the monitor profile, you get double correction and things look horrible. One could test this out by not doing the LUT load and seeing if the color-managed software looks accurate. There are some situations where you should not do a LUT load as that just restricts what the monitor can produce and can generate banding and other undesirable characteristics. There are cases where you will get the best performance in color-managed apps without LUT load.
If you insist on LUT load, then you should load the LUT and then profile your monitor with the LUT loaded so you create a monitor profile that describes your monitor when the LUT is loaded. Then, the color-managed apps can correct to the right thing.
i decided this time to do no pre-monitor calibration jsut leave all controls at default and run the profiler, this time the oclor-managed stuff makes things look better than the non-color managed (although now my non-color managed stuff is worse with the primaries and gamut arrggggh). maybe when i adjusted the primaries as much as i could with the controls it made it hard on my profiler for some weird reason?
but now i have another issue, photmechanic and CS4 are both color managed but do not show things the same way, close but ot the same, with PM looking a bit better to my eye.
but worst is the CS4 black-point compensation mess i seem to have.
if I have it turned on even painting 0,0,0 looks a little dark gray and not black and the darkest parts of my images are low in contrast and a little washed out and prints come out a tad crushed.
But if I turn BPC off, while i get better contrast and what looks like as black as my monitor can go for 0,0,0, the darks now look a little darker than photmechanic shows them when it has color management disabled nevermind when it has it on, although it seems a bit better comprise.
It seems to me that somethign weird is going on with how CS4 handles deep shadows, doesn't seem as accurate or nice as with photomechanic and worse when I leave BPC on (which people seem to say to do) my blacks are gone and low level contrast is gone and when I turn it on things seems a touch too dark then.
I'm not even sure which is way it should really be, i'm guessing PM is most accurate with color management on and then CS4 with BPC turned off (since BPC on just seems weird, how can a pitch black part of an image not make my monitor show it's darkest color possible??)
what is going on with CS4!
maybe smething about the monitor profile confused it? maybe it didnt set a blackpoint or set it in some way that confuses CS4??
or CS4 was somehow not expecting the LUT loader to brighten up darks as much as it did??
no, it's not that, they fixed that, my LUT stays loaded.
I did decide to do the profile again, this time with NO pre-calibration of my monitor settings, left them back at default, since I heard this works better with some monitors and some profilers.
this time the color-managed programs have the better gamut than the non-colro managed (however it seems a shame since before I could get a decent match for the non-color managed, argggh, and now with the monitor at default the primaries are farther off for my non-managed stuff now)
anyway, maybe i can hit some ideal combo of monitor adjustments for that stuff and for color-managed at once.
but more immediate concern is that i notice various color-managed programs DO NOT displays thigns quite the same, and actually photomechanic seems to make things measure out better than CS4 by a little bit.
of even greater concern is that when I leave "blackpoint compensation checked" in CS4 which I thoguht you were, then it seems to wash things out in the dark colors, even if i paint with 0,0,0 it doesn't seem as dark as monitor is capable of and things seems slightly lighter and less contrasy and less detailed than in photomechanic and then if I turn of BPC then I seem to get rich black back but now it makes the shadows even darker than photomechanic does, about as dark as photomechanic does when I have color-management turned off in that program.
It seems to me that photomechanic handels monitor profiles, at least the ones I making so far and maybe mine is not setting certain things the way CS4 expects as I have it set now, better. Colors are slightly truer overall and more importantly it seems to get rich blacks with a bit more detail and contrast and no washing out something I can't get CS4 to do.
If I use BPC CS4 makes deeps look lighter than they are then my prints get crushed a bit so I don't think I can use BPC for screen editing using CS4??
If I turn it off it does make thing a touch more crushed than photomechanic though.
Not sure what to trust, but not sure i'm liking or trusting what CS4 does entirely.... what photomechanic does in color managed mode seems much more reasonable to me and matches prints better I think.....
argghh...
i think there may be a bug in CS4 if you have scene-referred profiles option check (it'sjust below BPC) it seems to make the darks fade out almost like it is showing 16-235 video instead of 0-255?? it did say something abotu make sure to check this to maintain compatability with their video editors.
many sites say to keep this check, i wonder if they are wrong,or if the function is buggedsince it doesnt always seem to ruin my blacks....
t
well irfanview says that it does look at picture ICC profiles and DOES use them (if you tell it to in preferences) but it merely converts them to sRGB and DOES NOT use the monitor profile. So this does seem to be program of type 2.
No, there is no type 2. That program may say its kind of, sort of, maybe, is sometimes ICC aware, if its NOT using the display profile, its NOT an ICC aware application. Does it match the previews in Photoshop?
i think there may be a bug in CS4 if you have scene-referred profiles option check (it'sjust below BPC) it seems to make the darks fade out almost like it is showing 16-235 video instead of 0-255??
No, there is no type 2. That program may say its kind of, sort of, maybe, is sometimes ICC aware, if its NOT using the display profile, its NOT an ICC aware application. Does it match the previews in Photoshop?
well, if it is aware of ICC profiles in pics but not of ICC monitor profiles it is certainly different from programs that are aware of both or neither, whatever you want to call it. anyway, it's a minor point either way in the end.
where it says "Compensate for Scene-referred Profiles"
not quite sure what is going on yet, but sometimes when that has been toggled things star acting weird and sometimes that alone fades my blacks or sometimes BPC alone does or only in combo (and all with the same picture loaded the same way).
Actually it may not be that toggle alone but either BPC or that alone or both seem to be acting in weird ways. Sometimes the same combinations fades my blacks and sometimes it doesn't and when I use the preview toggle sometimes toggling it on and off show the difference and sometimes it doesn't (and this is with same picture loaded in the same way).
No clue what is going, not sure if some bug in CS4 or my video card drivers and how it interacts with CS4, etc.
but it is pretty weird that haveing the same combination of those three toggles doesn't always act the same way as I play around with them.....
PhotoMechanic doesn't jump around it always looks the same in the deep shadows for each of the two settings it allows (color-managed or non-colormanaged).
Has anyone heard anything about BPC bugs in CS4? or in combo with certain video cards or types of monitor profiles??
OK here is the story:
CS4 with BPC turned on DOES NOT match any of my other color-aware programs, it makes shadows brighter, fades out black and shows less contrast in images compared to Firefox 3 with ICC turned on or Photomechanic with color management turned on or Lightroom 2. I must have BPC turned OFF in CS4 to get black showing as black on my monitor, however, when I turn BPC off the shadows look more crushed than they do in my other color-managed programs, about as crushed as they do in my non-color managed programs. Oddly, firefox, photomechanic and LR have slight differences too, with PM showing a trace more crush than the other, but they are still pretty much in the same ballpark and FF3 and LR2 may be exactly the same even.
So is BPC totally bugged in CS4 or what??
When it is on (and most sites seem to claim you should have it on) the pics do not look right at all and when it is off they still don't match other color-managed programs since now the shadows are as dark as in non-color aware programs.
where it says "Compensate for Scene-referred Profiles"
not quite sure what is going on yet, but sometimes when that has been toggled things star acting weird and sometimes that alone fades my blacks or sometimes BPC alone does or only in combo (and all with the same picture loaded the same way).
That's only for Photoshop to video (After Effects) and back conversions. Stay away from everything in the advanced (hurt me) section of this dialog!
That section ONLY comes into play when you use Mode Change.
BPC is a unique Adobe option in their CMM (ACE). It should always be on.
That's only for Photoshop to video (After Effects) and back conversions. Stay away from everything in the advanced (hurt me) section of this dialog!
That section ONLY comes into play when you use Mode Change.
BPC is a unique Adobe option in their CMM (ACE). It should always be on.
the problem is when I turn it (BPC) on in CS4 black disappears, I can paint with 0,0,0 and it looks like dark gray, not even close to what black looks liek on my monitor, all the fine details in my pics in the shadows loose contrast and it just turns into a gray mush.
And I don't believe this is how it should look since it DOES NOT look like this in photomechanic, in Firefox3, or in Lightroom.
here is one example (Lightroom 2 on the left and CS4 on the right (sRGB working space, BPC on, Adobe ACE, Relative Colormetric):
THE only way I can make images in CS4 look anything like they do in photomechanic, firefox3 (with CM on), or lightroom2 is to use Microsoft ICM instead of Adobe ACE and to turn BPC off. Th every things that have always been things to NOT do in CS. Thinking there must be a bug somewhere or some bad handshaking between CS4 and something my monitor profiling software says abotu the balckpoint or with my gfx drivers or something??
does anyone else get CS4 giving them different blackpoints and shadow detail and contrast them with other programs such as lightroom??
If you insist on LUT load, then you should load the LUT and then profile your monitor with the LUT loaded so you create a monitor profile that describes your monitor when the LUT is loaded. Then, the color-managed apps can correct to the right thing.
I insist on nothing other than that I am confused, lol. How do I not do the LUT load?
I insist on nothing other than that I am confused, lol. How do I not do the LUT load?
I don't know anything about the software you're using so it's hard for me to make any suggestions on how to change it. If I were you, I'd poor over the documentation for your profiling software, plow through all the nooks and crannies of their UI and then hit Google with "LUT load" and something that uniquely identifies the brand of profiling software you're running and see what turns up.
Comments
My guess is you have double profiling where you have two separate processes correcting for your monitor profile. When you use color-managed software, you get double correcting, when you don't use color-managed software, you get a single correction and it looks right. If this is the case, the solution here is to get rid of the double profiling, not to turn off Photoshop's profiling.
Are you on XP or Vista? Do you have an LCD monitor or CRT monitor?
Can you look in your startup sequence and make sure that Adobe Gamma is not set to run? Is anything else running there that might have something to do with color or your monitor?
What kind of video card do you have? Do you have software in your startup sequence that comes with your video card that is loading? Is there are control panel app for your video card?
Homepage • Popular
JFriend's javascript customizations • Secrets for getting fast answers on Dgrin
Always include a link to your site when posting a question
I'm on Vista Business 32-bit. It's a laptop, but the screen is an S-IPS lcd. Video card is an ATI V5200. The ATI control center is currently set to deactivate ATI color controls and I don't have adobe gamma in the startup.
for sRGB images though shouldn't the LUT and profile loader on startup be all you need? It seems strange to me that IE or irfanview show simple sRGB profile jpgs differently than say CS4.
When the LUT table gets loaded in it does very much change how pictures look in IE and irfanview (grayscales, etc. everything look much better and gamma along the whole ramp changes, etc.) so shouldn't sRGB pics look fine in them since isn't the LUT supposed to matching sRGB to my monitor? And isn't the whole point of the loading up the profile to make the gamma and white point and color balance of my monitor closer to the exact sRGB
I know they wont make adobergb and non-sRGB stuff look right in non-ICC aware programs, but shouldn't sRGB pics display the same way in any program??
and waht is most bizarre is this:
and why would loading the LUT and then removing the monitor in windows color mangement profile before loading CS4 -OR- not loading the LUT at startup but leaving the monitor profile associated with the monitor make CS4 display things in the exact same way? Doesn't that imply that the LUT laoding at startup does the EXACT same thing CS4 does itself when it gets informed by windows that there is an ICC profile assigned to the monitor and it decides to take that into account itself?
And isn't using both then double profile? I.E. CS4 say does sRGB->Monitor Profile and then the video card has the sRGB->Monitor Profile loaded into it and it gets fed the monitor profiled info from CS4 thinking it is sRGB and then it applies the transform again? THis really really seems to be what is happening, since if I apply the transform twice it looks just like what CS4 shows when I load the LUT at start and windows informs it about a monitor profile.
and using just the LUT at start OR just having windows tell CS4 about the minitor profile but not both not only both make CS4 do the exact same thing but both make it show sRGB jpg files exactly the way that irfanview does if I have the LUT loaded into the video card. and again when I leave everything set then colro-managed stuff looks different, but oddly enough in EXACTLY the same way as if the LUT and matrix transform loaded into the video card where to be applied to data and then again applied to that data....
leaving the LUT loading and the profile assigned seems to do very much what it seems doing about twice of everything the LUT alone did.
I thought the LUT profile loader applied a matrix transform (as well as additionally adjustments for those that also have a LUT) in the graphics card which transforms from say sRGB primaries to what the actually are on the monitor, no? Isn't that jsut what gets done when you load the profile with the LUT loader? Why do you need CS4 to take advantage of that?
I thought ICC savvy for color-aware programs only meant they could ahndle adobeRGB, ProPhotoRGB and other non-sRGB spaces in additon to the sRGB that everything else can handle fine.
when I do load the LUT at start and do leave the profile coloreyes made assigned to the monitor photoshop alters the colors a bit AND even makes shadows a bit brighter compared to irfanview.... and it just seems very surprising that loading the LUT alone or just having it apply the profile alone should make it render with, as far as I can tell, the EXACT same look, why in the world should those two things end up shifting things the exact same way if they really are doing different things?
and if CS4 is not ending up with double profiles applied then why do prints that i make in CS4 look a lot more like the images shown in irfanview (or CS4 with only LUT or profile but not both)?
I also noted as did the OP that if I set proofing on and use sRGB as the workspace and set the target as my monitor profile then colors look exactly as they do in irfanview and such.
but if the LUT loaded into a graphics card is doing its best to account from how the monitor differs from sRGB and if a color-aware program looking at the monitor profile does it's best to shift colors as they need be to give the right color on teh monitor to match the sRGB color and then if that gets sent to the card which is already using the LUT why does this not give double profiling?
Note that when I don't use the LUT loader but do have the monitor assigned in windows color management that the prints CS4 makes look closer than what CS4 shows when I also load the LUT as well and that loading one or the other makes CS4 show images the EXACT same way and that having both set at once appears to just shift colors and brightness by twice the amount as having only set at once.
so why does not imply that color-aware programs end up doing double profiling under windows vista when the LUT is also loaded at startup??
same here (although I should note that what we think of blue primary actually is a bit more like what most people are used to calling purplish)
but that said I do notice a shift towards purple, twice as large when I use both the LUT and leave monitor profile assigned
see this is what I think too
everyone tells me no always trust CS4 and yes you msut have the software that profiled your machine use the LUT loader at start but i could swear this results in double profiling under Vista (or at least vista plus ATI graphics card that supports LUT and matrix)
and i see so many people talk abotu this and then decided that colro-managed stuff understands things so it must be correct and other stuff is wrong but I think it is the color-managed stuff that is wrong when you use a LUT loader since I think you get double profiling and I think tons of people are going around making messed up images since nobody seems to have looked into it enough to start thinking that it actualy might be double profiling.
i admit i may well be wrong though
tell me what happens when you do this:
bootup machine as normal (make sure you have the profile your profiling software made assigned to the monitor under vista color management!) with your LUT loading loading the profiel globally to the video card and then AFTER that has finished go to vista colro management again and uncheck the box (or maybe check it) whatever it is that makes it do the remove these settings from current monitor to get rid of the association of the profile with the monitor and THEN load CS2 (oh and make sure just for this simple test to have earlier set CS2 workspace to sRGB and to have turned off proofing) and then load an sRGB jpg int CS2 and tell how it looks then....
doing this, and only doing this, appears to make non-aware programs show sRGB files correctly AND colro-aware programs show sRGB as well as any other sort of colorspaced file show correctly. Anything else I do either makes non-aware stuff show uncalibrated colors and aware stuff work great or aware stuff appear to be using double monitor profiling and unaware stuff show sRGB stuff correctly. (well also I found that setting proof to my monitor also works, but just for CS4 and at that ONYL if the workspace is sRGB but not everyone really necessarily wants the workspae to be sRGB so i don't find this a great solution since I like to use ProPhotRGB as the workspace and many people like to use AdobeRGB)
IE and that other app (which I don't use) are not color managed. That's key. 255G/0R/0B is not the same color in sRGB as it is in Adobe RGB (1998). Non ICC aware applications don't know that since they have no idea what sRGB nor Adobe RGB nor any other color space is (they are ICC unaware). All they "see" is 255G/R0/B0 and send that to the screen (though the graphic system).
There's more to all this than just having a display profile (does the application know what to do with this profile? In non ICC aware applications, not at all).
Nope, not enough info to do the full job. What's missing is the Display Using Monitor Compensation architecture in ICC aware applications which looks at the data from the document taking account of its color space and building a document specific preview conversion for that space WITH the display profile. IE and that other app simply don't do that.
Not at all! And you don't have an sRGB display unless you're running a circa 1993 CRT with P22 Phosphors . The sRGB color space is a theoretical color space based on an emissive display who's specifications (down to the ambient light this theoretical display resides in), are a set of simple mathematical spec's (gamma, white point and primary chromaticity of the phosphors in this case).
Author "Color Management for Photographers"
http://www.digitaldog.net/
yeah i know 0,34,56 in sRGB is not the same as 0,34,56 in AdobeRGB and unless my LCD is exactly sRGB then 0,34,56 RGB on it is not likely to be 0,34,56 in sRGB.
that is not the issue
i'm not expecting non-color managed stuff to ever display adobergb or prophoto or any of that stuff properly
and i'm not expecting my monitor, BEFORE profiling, to display sRGB properly, but shouldn't loading the LUT and/or matrix conversion into my gfx card then make my vid card adjust anything sent to it as sRGB to display properly on my monitor?
and the problem is that color-managed stuff on windows vista appears to convert whatever profile the pic is in to Monitor Profile but when the LUT is loaded into the video card it is already doing an sRGB->Monitor Profile so it is getting the output that has already been converted to monitor profile and then treating that as sRGB and then converting it again, at least this is what it really, really looks like is happening.
No. Because the application doesn't know the document is in sRGB or for that matter what sRGB is.
Color managed application can only be color managed with certain info:
1. What are the RGB numbers? (lets stick to one color model although it doesn't matter).
2. What are the scale of the numbers (what color space)?
3. What's the color space of the display?
Convert sRGB to display RGB for preview purposes (Display Using Monitor Compensation).
Author "Color Management for Photographers"
http://www.digitaldog.net/
I'm piping in here only because I went through the same process you are. When I first started calibrating my monitor, I thought that calibrating my monitor meant that it was going to make my monitor work like sRGB and therefore even non-color-managed apps should work OK if given sRGB input. As it turns out, that is just not the case. Let me repeat, that is just not the case and you shouldn't be trying to make it be that with LUT loaders and all that.
The calibration software may tweak some parameters on the monitor, but particularly with LCDs, it is NOT trying to change the monitor to simulate sRGB. It's main purpose in life is to create the monitor profile which describes how the monitor behaves, it does not change the monitor's behavior for non-color-managed apps.
The monitor profile can then be read by color-managed software to accurately display colors on the monitor. You HAVE to give up the notion that non-color-managed software is going to do anything accurate for you. It just isn't. With Firefox3 and Safari both having color management capabilities now, you can pretty much give up using or relying on non-color-managed software.
Further, given that many new LCD monitors are capable of displaying a color gamut that is greater than sRGB, if you somehow made the monitor into an sRGB monitor, you'd be throwing away all that new display capability.
So, anyway I got a system that works properly when I just stopped relying on any color display from non-color-managed apps. It will be off. Ironically with today's wide gamut monitors, it's off even more than it used to be. But, more and more apps are color-managed so just stick with the color-managed world and don't try to force your monitor to be like sRGB and you can make it all work fine.
Homepage • Popular
JFriend's javascript customizations • Secrets for getting fast answers on Dgrin
Always include a link to your site when posting a question
Anthony.
ok so everything i had been hinting at was WRONG
i had gotten led astray by an almost unique coincidence where the picture I was examining happend by pure chance to have waht the LUT did to it and what the monitor profile each seperately be nearly the same and by the fact that the monitor profile for my monitor seems to not be quite correct in the second stage.
but for those who have run into similar confusions
and since there is tons of variously conflicting stuff posted all over the net much wrong to varying degrees and to make up the mess of wrong stuff I myself posted earlier....
to sum up:
Monitor Profiles have two parts:
part1:
LUT loaders only set things so that gamma and color balance for a certain selected color temperature are displayed properly and DO NOT apply a transformation to the monitor's color space. Monitors vary in how closey they can be adusted by monitors knobs to exact sRGB color space (ones that have a full CMS can often be adjusted exceedinyl close, those without a full CMS usually have the green primary somewhat off and sometimes the primary intensities off as well, usually too saturated and hot)
part 2:
there is a second part to a monitor profile, the first part gets loaded into teh LUT above (and MUST be loaded for the rest of the monitor profile to make sense, when peopel say to remove AdobeGamma and LUT loaders they only mean to remove ones that did not come with your color profiling package you still MUST run the one that your profiling package made or if you use a different once insure that it loads the proper profile), but the second part is the transformation into the monitor color space. It accounts for the actual position of the monitor gamut's primary locations and intensities. Some color profiling programs onyl correct for this and just apply a simple matrix transform others at least appear to do more and perhaps use some sort of long color table to also try to adjust for an non-uniformities within the monitor's gamut (not sure if this is true, but it seems like some more advanced progams such as coloreyes do produce this a more advanced type of monitor profile that goes this extra step).
Programs for viewing:
there appear to be four sorts
1. completely non-color managed
these WILL take advantage of what the LUT loader did so they will at least display pics with the more or less proper gamma setting and color balance temperature (but only if you did make sure to have the LUT loader load the correct profile for your monitor at the start). They will not transform into your monitor's actual color space and pay no attention to teh second part of the color profile mentioned above so they will NOT display pictures entirely correctly on your monitor unless it has a full CMS and was carefull adjusted internally. But sRGB pics should still look at least vaguely and perhaps very, very closely to how they should. Pictures in other formats such as adobergb or prophotorgb will be displayed COMPLETELY wrong since these programs do no do a photo color space to sRGB transform (not a photo color space to monitor color space transform)
example programs appear to be the windows desktop and Internet Explorer
2. partially managed type A
these know how read the ICC profile in a PHOTO so they can adjust for photos using adobeRGB or pro2photo or whatnot, however they convert them to sRGB colorspace and then send to the graphics card they DO NOT know how to read the monitor profile and convert to monitor color space. But at least all pictures should look within some at least semi-reasonable ballpark.
an example is irfanview (IF you turn on color management)
3. partially managed type B
they onyl understand sRGB pics but can transform them to monitor color space
all pics viewed with these that are in sRGB format will look perfect and exactly match CS4 and the like but anything in a different format such as adobergb, etc. will be wrong
4. fully color managed programs
these read the ICC profile in pictures and so can properly work with a picture in any format that it knows how to convert from and as well they also understand monitor profiles so they can convert not just to sRGB for viewing but to the monitor's actual color gamut (note that if the profiling was done with a program that creates a LUT for a gfx card you must first load that in for this to work properly)
basically anything you toss at them should be displayed as correctly as the quality of your monitor and the monitor profile and LUT make possible, everything should look extremely much as it should in all cases
a few examples are CS4, CS3, CS2, Photomechanic
some possible other examples are perhaps firefox if you go in and set all of things that need to be set properly, maybe safari (but apparently there are many ways in which it can fail ro fail if things are not all set correctly and it's not to be trusted, although the comment i read on this was from soem while back and may no longer apply)
wrap up:
the dual-stage monitor profiles explain why loading the LUT in is NOT enough for proper colors
the four types of program awareness explain why even if you do have the proper profile loaded into the LUT various programs will displays pictures differently, EVEN pictures just using the plain old simple sRGB that all programs understand.
final note: on profiles gone bad:
sometimes profiles are not made correctly and if the first stage goes wrong the monitor will not measure to the proper gamma and/or colro temperature and if the second stage goes wrong (as appears to have happened to me a bit, whcih further led to my initial confusion) the monitor gamut will not be corrected for entirely properly and this means anything from you'd have been better off without using it and colro managed programs of type 3 and 4 will actually do worse than type 2 or they will do better but not as much better as they could.
--
Nope, only two. Color managed or non color managed.
Author "Color Management for Photographers"
http://www.digitaldog.net/
thanks
well irfanview says that it does look at picture ICC profiles and DOES use them (if you tell it to in preferences) but it merely converts them to sRGB and DOES NOT use the monitor profile. So this does seem to be program of type 2. It may be the only such program. As for type 3, you may be correct, I haven't found any examples yet.
So I think correct would be most programs are not color managed, some such as CS4 and Firefox with the setting set are, and then there is one oddball, irfanview, that can translate various image profiles into sRGB but that is as far as it goes (I haven't tried this yet to see if it is true or not but this is what they claim on the irfanview site).
anyway, yeah, you are all correct, the last three psots there above mine explain it all too, I was very wrong to think simply having the the LUT loader load in the LUT did everything.
But I still have a weird issue and it is next the next message:
So I have my profiling program's LUT loader load the LUT at the start.
If I go and use something like Color HFCR to measure the gamma curve and the gray-scale color temp scale these now look VERY good, far better than without the LUT loaded. So the profiler did a good job in making the LUT and it is being loaded in properly. All is good with that.
What is not good is what happens in my color-managed apps since if I use color hfcr to measure the primaries for say sRGB as displayed in say CS4 they do not line up well on the CIE plot to the sRGB primaries and actually line up much less well than they do if I display them in a non-color managed app. Also the blue primary, even visually, looks rather far towards purple indeed in CS4 (and interestingly is a similar color to the water in the tank with the jellyfish the pic that got me noticing all this to begin with). I know the sRGB blue primary DOES look a bit toward purple compared to what we are used to thinking of as blue, but this looks totally out and out purple.
Anyway viewing colors bars in various programs and measuring them (using ColorEyes probe and colorhcfr program to make these plots) and all of these assume the LUT was loaded (not that it really affects the primaries anyway though):
this is how they measured using a non-monitor profile aware program (not too bad really):
this is how they measured using the color-aware photomechanic with management turned on (worse):
this is how they measured using the color-aware CS4 (even worse still):
CS4 had the workingspace set to sRGB and no-proofing (if I turn on proofing and set target as my monitor then they look like what the non-aware program did, more or less, which I guess makes sense).
and here is one set of color bars i used in reduced size for easy posting (i also used some full screen per color ones froma different source and the results are more or less the same as above):
so what is going on here?
is the profiler making a bad second stage profile?
do i have something set wrong in vista?
should i not be using these as the color bars?
thanks
See, I get that, but the question is why is it actually being accurate and the color-managed stuff being grossly inaccurate, and I think the answer is in this double-proofing stuff, if only I could figure out how to make it stop.
i'm not so sure it is double profiling anymore.
my jellyfish pick made it seem exactly like it was that, but now looking at other pictures it does not seem to be the case (at least for me) since I see that the LUT load alone or the monitor profile in a color aware program alone, for almost all pics, make very different adjustments and the monitor profile adjustments are usually much smaller in degree (that one picture I had was a weird coincidence it seems where both those things appeared to do the same thing to the same degree).
but in the end, I do seem to be getting the color-aware programs actually making the colors worse (and I think not matching my prints as well but i need to check again to be sure now). They sure do seem to give a big purple push on the blue primary for one. I can't figure out why. Also note that on the CIE plots you can even see the purple push on the blue primary.
Hmm I didn't sell of my spyder yet, when I get back to my other place I can do a profile with the spyder software and see what happens. That might help give some more clues.
My guess, just a guess because I know nothing about your software, is that the monitor profile was created assuming no LUT load. Thus, when you do the LUT load and then the color-managed software comes along and attempts to manage for the monitor profile, you get double correction and things look horrible. One could test this out by not doing the LUT load and seeing if the color-managed software looks accurate. There are some situations where you should not do a LUT load as that just restricts what the monitor can produce and can generate banding and other undesirable characteristics. There are cases where you will get the best performance in color-managed apps without LUT load.
If you insist on LUT load, then you should load the LUT and then profile your monitor with the LUT loaded so you create a monitor profile that describes your monitor when the LUT is loaded. Then, the color-managed apps can correct to the right thing.
Homepage • Popular
JFriend's javascript customizations • Secrets for getting fast answers on Dgrin
Always include a link to your site when posting a question
i decided this time to do no pre-monitor calibration jsut leave all controls at default and run the profiler, this time the oclor-managed stuff makes things look better than the non-color managed (although now my non-color managed stuff is worse with the primaries and gamut arrggggh). maybe when i adjusted the primaries as much as i could with the controls it made it hard on my profiler for some weird reason?
but now i have another issue, photmechanic and CS4 are both color managed but do not show things the same way, close but ot the same, with PM looking a bit better to my eye.
but worst is the CS4 black-point compensation mess i seem to have.
if I have it turned on even painting 0,0,0 looks a little dark gray and not black and the darkest parts of my images are low in contrast and a little washed out and prints come out a tad crushed.
But if I turn BPC off, while i get better contrast and what looks like as black as my monitor can go for 0,0,0, the darks now look a little darker than photmechanic shows them when it has color management disabled nevermind when it has it on, although it seems a bit better comprise.
It seems to me that somethign weird is going on with how CS4 handles deep shadows, doesn't seem as accurate or nice as with photomechanic and worse when I leave BPC on (which people seem to say to do) my blacks are gone and low level contrast is gone and when I turn it on things seems a touch too dark then.
I'm not even sure which is way it should really be, i'm guessing PM is most accurate with color management on and then CS4 with BPC turned off (since BPC on just seems weird, how can a pitch black part of an image not make my monitor show it's darkest color possible??)
what is going on with CS4!
maybe smething about the monitor profile confused it? maybe it didnt set a blackpoint or set it in some way that confuses CS4??
or CS4 was somehow not expecting the LUT loader to brighten up darks as much as it did??
no, it's not that, they fixed that, my LUT stays loaded.
I did decide to do the profile again, this time with NO pre-calibration of my monitor settings, left them back at default, since I heard this works better with some monitors and some profilers.
this time the color-managed programs have the better gamut than the non-colro managed (however it seems a shame since before I could get a decent match for the non-color managed, argggh, and now with the monitor at default the primaries are farther off for my non-managed stuff now)
anyway, maybe i can hit some ideal combo of monitor adjustments for that stuff and for color-managed at once.
but more immediate concern is that i notice various color-managed programs DO NOT displays thigns quite the same, and actually photomechanic seems to make things measure out better than CS4 by a little bit.
of even greater concern is that when I leave "blackpoint compensation checked" in CS4 which I thoguht you were, then it seems to wash things out in the dark colors, even if i paint with 0,0,0 it doesn't seem as dark as monitor is capable of and things seems slightly lighter and less contrasy and less detailed than in photomechanic and then if I turn of BPC then I seem to get rich black back but now it makes the shadows even darker than photomechanic does, about as dark as photomechanic does when I have color-management turned off in that program.
It seems to me that photomechanic handels monitor profiles, at least the ones I making so far and maybe mine is not setting certain things the way CS4 expects as I have it set now, better. Colors are slightly truer overall and more importantly it seems to get rich blacks with a bit more detail and contrast and no washing out something I can't get CS4 to do.
If I use BPC CS4 makes deeps look lighter than they are then my prints get crushed a bit so I don't think I can use BPC for screen editing using CS4??
If I turn it off it does make thing a touch more crushed than photomechanic though.
Not sure what to trust, but not sure i'm liking or trusting what CS4 does entirely.... what photomechanic does in color managed mode seems much more reasonable to me and matches prints better I think.....
argghh...
many sites say to keep this check, i wonder if they are wrong,or if the function is buggedsince it doesnt always seem to ruin my blacks....
this might be my final main issue...
No, there is no type 2. That program may say its kind of, sort of, maybe, is sometimes ICC aware, if its NOT using the display profile, its NOT an ICC aware application. Does it match the previews in Photoshop?
Author "Color Management for Photographers"
http://www.digitaldog.net/
Scene referred profiles option?
Author "Color Management for Photographers"
http://www.digitaldog.net/
well, if it is aware of ICC profiles in pics but not of ICC monitor profiles it is certainly different from programs that are aware of both or neither, whatever you want to call it. anyway, it's a minor point either way in the end.
where it says "Compensate for Scene-referred Profiles"
not quite sure what is going on yet, but sometimes when that has been toggled things star acting weird and sometimes that alone fades my blacks or sometimes BPC alone does or only in combo (and all with the same picture loaded the same way).
No clue what is going, not sure if some bug in CS4 or my video card drivers and how it interacts with CS4, etc.
but it is pretty weird that haveing the same combination of those three toggles doesn't always act the same way as I play around with them.....
PhotoMechanic doesn't jump around it always looks the same in the deep shadows for each of the two settings it allows (color-managed or non-colormanaged).
Has anyone heard anything about BPC bugs in CS4? or in combo with certain video cards or types of monitor profiles??
OK here is the story:
CS4 with BPC turned on DOES NOT match any of my other color-aware programs, it makes shadows brighter, fades out black and shows less contrast in images compared to Firefox 3 with ICC turned on or Photomechanic with color management turned on or Lightroom 2. I must have BPC turned OFF in CS4 to get black showing as black on my monitor, however, when I turn BPC off the shadows look more crushed than they do in my other color-managed programs, about as crushed as they do in my non-color managed programs. Oddly, firefox, photomechanic and LR have slight differences too, with PM showing a trace more crush than the other, but they are still pretty much in the same ballpark and FF3 and LR2 may be exactly the same even.
So is BPC totally bugged in CS4 or what??
When it is on (and most sites seem to claim you should have it on) the pics do not look right at all and when it is off they still don't match other color-managed programs since now the shadows are as dark as in non-color aware programs.
That's only for Photoshop to video (After Effects) and back conversions. Stay away from everything in the advanced (hurt me) section of this dialog!
That section ONLY comes into play when you use Mode Change.
BPC is a unique Adobe option in their CMM (ACE). It should always be on.
Author "Color Management for Photographers"
http://www.digitaldog.net/
the problem is when I turn it (BPC) on in CS4 black disappears, I can paint with 0,0,0 and it looks like dark gray, not even close to what black looks liek on my monitor, all the fine details in my pics in the shadows loose contrast and it just turns into a gray mush.
And I don't believe this is how it should look since it DOES NOT look like this in photomechanic, in Firefox3, or in Lightroom.
here is one example (Lightroom 2 on the left and CS4 on the right (sRGB working space, BPC on, Adobe ACE, Relative Colormetric):
THE only way I can make images in CS4 look anything like they do in photomechanic, firefox3 (with CM on), or lightroom2 is to use Microsoft ICM instead of Adobe ACE and to turn BPC off. Th every things that have always been things to NOT do in CS. Thinking there must be a bug somewhere or some bad handshaking between CS4 and something my monitor profiling software says abotu the balckpoint or with my gfx drivers or something??
does anyone else get CS4 giving them different blackpoints and shadow detail and contrast them with other programs such as lightroom??
I insist on nothing other than that I am confused, lol. How do I not do the LUT load?
Homepage • Popular
JFriend's javascript customizations • Secrets for getting fast answers on Dgrin
Always include a link to your site when posting a question