I'm the biggest monitor calibration evangelist you'll ever meet, and I'll gladly preach at you until your ears bleed about why you must calibrate your monitor.
But, I have to admit that calibration presents a couple of problems for people with small-gamut screens. (I'm mainly talking about laptop screens, but other low-end LCDs are affected too.)
Some of the relevant scientific concepts are brain-melting, and far beyond my understanding. I will simplify the main concepts to a level which I understand, and I hope other colour-management novices will be able to make sense of it too.
The problems
There are two problems arising from calibrating a small-gamut monitor:
Detail disappearing from bright colours
After calibration, you might find that subtle highlight detail in your vivid floral photos has turned to flat "bleh".
Blues turning purple
It's very common to hear the lament "I calibrated, and now everyone's blue jeans are purple!" If you've had this problem, you'll know exactly what I'm talking about.
The irony
The bitter irony is, these problems only exist in Photoshop and other colour-managed applications. If you view your images in a "dumb" program, your blues will look blue, and your bright colours will look fine.
This can lead users to throw up their hands in despair, and shove their monitor calibration device in a cupboard (or on eBay).
Calibration is not the culprit
Poor old calibration gets a bad rap - it's not his fault.
The process we commonly call "calibration" is actually two processes - Calibration and Profiling.
Calibration is the physical adjustments we make to the monitor (most commonly Brightness) with or without the guidance of the calibration device.
Profiling is where the device analyses your screen and records a description of its behaviour, then saves this description as an ICC Profile. Photoshop then consults this profile in order to properly display your images.
Trouble is, Photoshop uses this profile a little too well, as we'll see.
I'd love to show you some examples ...
... but it's no use. If I posted a photo of a blue sky, for example, it would look blue to some of you, and purple to others.
It would all depend on the particular idiosyncracies of your monitor, not to mention the web browser you're using.
But if you're reading this article, I figure you know what the problems look like anyway!
Relax, your printing won't be affected
No matter how bad these issues might look on your screen, remember that they are only superficial display issues. Your image data is fine, and it will print perfectly well.
Of course, you can strike problems with colour-management when printing, too, but they are unrelated to our present discussion.
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Let's talk about the flat colours first. Click here to continue.
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All content © Damien Symonds 2012