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Full Version: Monitor setup/calibration
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Don't know if it's a good art question but recently I played a bit with my monitors and I must say that really alot of how do you see colors and contrast depends from it. I know that I should set up my screens to match the the printing device that I use, but if you draw/paint mainly for digital/internet use... it's not that obvious. Many laptop/tablets screens are really crappy and still, people watch what you drew on them. I really got disappointed when I saw my works on iPad for example... The question is... what's the best setup in your opinion. Or maybe it's the matter of value/color contrast on my artwork, not the screen and I just lack proper skills to ballance those. :)
i dont think it has anything to do with lack of skill. i think ( im not 100% sure about this !) i heard david rapoza talk to daniel warren on a stream , talk about how the screen on ipads actually do have pretty good color. hes got a post about calibration too http://daverapoza.blogspot.ca/2010/03/mo...ation.html . just try to match your monitor to what it is supposed to be, it can get frustrating. in the end theres no way to make sure everyone sees your work the exact same but if the values are good enough it will hold up to any little change it can have through a viewers monitor.
Thank you for the answer. I actually have an IPS Dell monitor. Who knows, maybe the same which is mentioned in the post. Anyway I get very saturated colors and a lot of tones in the shadows. When I view the same piece on some other monitor, colors aren't that saturated anymore and shadows become gray/black. Maybe I should just set mine up to get the same results.
Your Dell IPS monitor is capable of reproducing more of the Adobe RGB gamut. This is why you can see rich colours and subtle nuances in hue shift. The other monitors aren't capable of representing the same range.

There might be other factors at play too, like the contrast ratio of each monitor. Or if you're outputting a jpeg for web, it'll have an sRGB colourspace, so your colours won't be as vivid.

You'll never be able to control what the user sees on their screen either, so it's all kind of futile, but you shouldn't worry too much as display on screen isn't nearly as colour-critical as print.

The tools in Dave's blog post look good; I'd recommend calibrating your IPS to the best representation of those tests. Calibrate the other monitors too, eyeballing the IPS as a guide. You can then use the secondary monitors as a gauge for how your image will be viewed by others and before final output do some tweaks to curves and saturation till it produces a result that's acceptable on those screens.
You're probably right. Actually I had no problem with setting my screen right for printing, but for the digital... you quite never know who, on what will be viewing your art.
One more question... what kind of gamma setting do you use? 2.2 or 1.8?