PhotoBanter.com - View Single Post - Monitor calibration and color managed workflow question

Graeme Cogger

In article , says...
Hi,

I bought a Colorvision Spyder and calibrated my monitor.
It really helped. However, I am not really sure how this
works and I fear I might be double-color-managing.

The Spyder generates an ICC profile, puts it somewhere
into windows directory and registers it with the graphics
card. On startup the ProfileChooser takes the default profile
and loads it into graphics card. That means that I am able
to see accurate colors with applications that are not
color managed - web browser, ...

What I do not understand is what happens when I edit the
photo in Photoshop Elements (I do not have the 'big' PS,
so I am not sure whether this is different there). If it
also uses the default profile taken from windows,
I get double color-managing. And I think this is really
the case - when I open the same image in the PSE and
in the default browser, it looks that the result is not
the same - there are subtle differences in skin tones.

How is this supposed to work? Is there any way to have
both the non-managed and managed applications to display
the same (i.e. let the Profile Chooser load the lookup
tables and tell the Photoshop etc. to use sRGB or whatever
the display expects when the conversion is done down
in the LUT)? Or does the PSE _always_ use the default
monitor profile, whatever that is?

Thanks

I'll just paste a reply that I posted recently - this is quite a common
misunderstanding and concerns the difference between calibration and a
monitor profile. Sorry if it's a bit long...

Creating a monitor profile has 2 parts:
1 - Calibration: the display is adjusted (via settings in the graphics
card and maybe the monitor controls) to get things like colour
temperature, gamma etc. correct. All applications see the effect of the
calibration - this is what gets loaded to the graphics card when the
system starts up.
2 - Profiling: the response of the calibrated display is accurately
measured to create a profile of how it displays colour. This profile is
used by profile-aware applications to adjust the colours sent to the
graphics card and monitor. Without these adjustments, the colour
displayed will not be accurate.

Photoshop or PSE, as you can imagine, is profile-aware and displays
accurate colour. Most other applications (e.g. web browsers, Windows
itself) are not profile-aware, do not correct the colours sent to the
graphics card, and do not display accurate colour. That is why you are
seeing a difference.

Unfortunately (unless your PC is a Mac!), if you want a profiled monitor
you have to put up with a difference between Photoshop/PSE and most
other applications. Photoshop/PSE is correct