On Wed, 18 Jan 2017 11:35:51 -0900, (Floyd L.
Davidson) wrote:

Eric Stevens wrote:
For the last several years I have relied on an (almost) matched pairs
of Dell 2410 monitors - and now one has died. Not really surprising,
considering it was +8 years old, but it was a bloody good monitor. I
am now faced with the task of replacing it.

I don't want to just replace it as it would amount to no more than
installing 8 year old technology and I have been frantically beating
around the bush trying to decide what to do. I am considering all
kinds of options but I don't want to go into them now. One possibility
which is raising sweat to my brow is the use of a high gamut monitor
such as the Dell Ultrasharp 25 UP2516D
http://www.dell.com/en-us/shop/dell-...-accessoriesor
http://tinyurl.com/hdpepts

I've never seen one, but in the past have used various
Dell UltraSharp monitors for general purpose uses, and
like them all. I've never used one specifically for
image editing.

They all tend to be excessively vivid, with over bright
saturated colors. But proper calibration should control
that to at least some degree. Note that the eventual
effect is the opposite of what you see, so editing an
image with an over saturated monitor will result in
images that are under saturated to everyone else. And
viewing their images will result in more saturation than
they intended.

Yep. That's all understood. That's whay I have calibrated my screens
using various models of Spyder for many years.

My reading on the subject suggests that monitors such
as this can have problems with non-color-managed
applications such as many that can be found on the
Internet and can also create problems when editing
images in all kinds of software. I would like to know
if anyone has had any experience with such monitors and
what their comments may be. Should I consider them and,
if so, with what caveats in mind?

For image editing I use high end monitors purposely
targeted at the use. Currently I use Eizo and NEC
monitors. They can display a full 100% of Adobe RGB, as
well as what is actually needed, which is 100% of sRGB.

Do you ever use the Adobe RGB capability?

The problem is not the monitor's wide gamut, it's what
you set your software to use! Do yourself a favor and
ignore everything on this topic except for one sentence:
"Set everything to sRGB." That will save no end of
problems, and you won't lose a thing either.

Lightroom does everything in Pro Photo. Mind you, you can choose your
gamut when you output an image.

If you are doing layouts for a magazine, where they will
put your image on the top of the page an another image
from a different source on the bottom of the page, will
you ever want to use a higher gamut than sRGB. Those
two images need to match exactly! Imagine a Nikon
advertisement with two different shades of yellow on two
different pages. Nikon would have a fit and some ad
agency would lose a contract...

If you print for hanging on the wall or to post images
to the Internet, sRGB is perfect. If you set everything
you have, from the camera to the editor and viewers, to
sRGB you won't have a problem.

I'll give you an example of the kind of problem
possible. This is seen all the time. I frequent a
photography forum that will post 600x800 images. To see
an image larger than that they have an option to provide
the larger image as a download. In the forum post we
only see the 600x800 maximum sized thumbnails, and only
by clicking on a "Download Original" button we can see
whatever the full sized image is... with the Exif data
included! That 600x800, for privacy and other reasons,
has the Exif data stripped automatically.

So lots of folks edit images in either Adobe RGB or in
ProPhoto RGB colorspace. People post images without
converting them to sRGB. The 600x800 sized thumbnail has
the colorspace tag stripped and instead of being
displayed correctly as edited, it shows up as a very
flat image. The original, if downloaded, look perfect
(it still has the tag). If the original is converted to
sRGB before uploading the stripped thumbnail will look
correct, as will the original full sized image. That is
and easy to avoid problem!
--

Regards,

Eric Stevens