Howdy,
I've been trying to educate myself on the subject of color managment and I'm just short of getting "Real World Color Management", but perhaps someone can clue me in to a major question I still have on the subject.
I'm a little lost as to the exact relationship between monitor calibration and Color settings in PS. Allow me to elaborate.
I recently bought a hueyand it seemed to do a good calibration job. However (perhaps unlike more advanced calibrators, or even Adobe Gamma) it does not give a choice of a certain profile to start with, like sRGB, Adobe RGB or whatever. Once the calibration is finished, I have the option of using the custom profile in PS's Color Settings (as Monitor Color - Huey etc... ), but obviously the display differs from using say sRGB. On top of that, once selected, I can't change the Policies for RGB to anything other than OFF (options are grayed out). If I embed this profile in the saved image and then open it in other softwares (say ACDSee) it shows the profile as Unrecognized. I thought: fair enough...
I'd quite a bit of photography, some of it "professionally". Generally for print through professional photofinishing and some web display. My cameras are currently set to sRGB, but as I understand now a better option would be to go with AdobeRGB1998 in camera (or at RAW conversion) and US Prepress default in PS. That way the color pipeline should remain unchanged. But since my hardware monitor calibration does not allow me to set that ICC profile as a starting point, I feel a little stiffed. I'm afraid that Photoshop is simply ignoring the calibration. If I watch the same image in ACDSee (which is unmanaged) with monitor calibration and in PS with sRGB (which is the original document gamut), I get different colors.
So my question(s) are:
1. What is the impact on PS color managment from a hardware monitor calibration not originating from a preset ICC? Is monitor calibration independent of ICC profiles? As if huey will calibrate your monitor to make sure that red is red and blue is blue and then you decide which gamut exactly PS will display based on color settings.
2. Is it because huey is too basic? Would I be better off getting the Eye-One Display 2 (presuming it allows you t start with a specific profile like Adobe Gamma) and calibrating with that? and in that case...
3. If I was to start with AdobeRGB1998 as a starting profile for monitor calibration, would an image viewed in unmanaged software like ACDSee and PS (set to US Prepress Default) look exactly the same?
I know this may seem very basic, but I read a lot of "do this if you do web" and "set that if you do prepress" but I don't understand the relationship between those settings and hardware monitor calibration.
Any takers? |
