two monitors, two profiles one lightroom

For a while I had a wide gamut monitor that simply could not be calibrated with calibration pucks or even spectrophotometers. Basically it was always too red and too warm. After chasing this down for months and using many different calibration devices, I chased this down to be a failing of how color perception is accounted for in the calibration software and the monitor having a very wide (wavelength wise) red phosphor going into the near infrared. The standard eye-sensitivity curves (which are based on very old measurements and standards that do not accurately describe human vision) used in the calibration software could not deal with this! This was simply a design flaw in the monitor in that they used the wrong red phosphor. This was a monitor that was really well reviewed online for its great color but I could only get good color by manual calibration, not with a calibration puck.

I now own a wide gamut monitor that I can calibrate to be identical to my MacBook Pro display (apart from the colors outside of the MBP's screen gamut).

so as usual with colour management it gets very techy very quickly and that's where I start to get lost. the gammas, the luminance. luts and all that.

in the past I have followed all the right rules to calibrating my screens. Displaycal seems to do a good job job and runs a nice long calibration process. The problem with the spyder5 express software is I have no choice over white or anything. the express software seems okay with just the macbook but not as well with both monitors. I may have to try again.

also in summary, when I plug the external monitor into the macbook and run the calibration and calibrate both monitors and run lightroom or photoshop it seems to run as expected. But then at some point down the road like recently it goes all wacky and seems to get mixed up or something. The only way to match the exported jpeg and lightroom was to reset the macbook colour profile to default.

what would be the best solution? get a more advance calibrator like the colourmonki or spyder5 pro and just run that and make life easier?

my other option is ditch the external monitor and go back to just working on the macbook screen as it was atleast consistent and didnt demand as much processing power. the new 2k monitor and running lightrrom has been very demanding on my macbook air. software runs much slower and edit sliders have a nice delayed effect.

I thought getting a big wide gamut screen and 2k would make edits more enjoyable, but its actually been the opposite. Although the screen looks nice and colour is nice it has been a better work flow for me as the software runs slower and the colour management is stressful

Spyder5EXPRESS can calibrate two monitors on a system. That's not the problem.

You still need to know a little bit about using two screens on one graphic adapter:

Each profile created has two parts, one part will be used by the colormanagement of windows and the other part will be loaded into the Lookup-Table (LUT) of your graphic adapter. This is what SpyderUtility does on boot-time. See the LUT as a kind of translation table for creating the right colors.

To calibrate and use two screens on one system, you need to ensure using a graphic adapter with two separate Lookup-Tables.

If your graphic card has two separate LUTs can not be seen from the outside and you should ask you vendor or the manufacture of your adapter. Most modern video cards are including multiple LUTs.

Additional things that you should know and do:

Please give it another try and make sure to work in a dark room:

Set both displays to the highest brightness level.

Now, make sure to calibrate (FullCalibration) both displays to the exactly same target values for:

- gamma

- whitepoint

- brightness

But since both displays are never exactly standing at the same spot in the workingspace, there could be different ambient light which may also influent color calibration and color appereance. They can even influence each other (shining on the other screen). Try to avoid this as best as you can.

If both displays would operate via one and the same computer, you should match their different luminance levels with the StudioMatch feature of Spyder5Elite. Another useful tool to match the color output is SpyderTune which is also included in Spyder5ELITE.

SpyderTune allows visual compensation of different monitor types. Newer displays often use LED backlight while others (mostly older ones) use CCFL backlight. These are physically different light sources which produce a very different light spectrum. But this is only an issue while you are looking at both at the same time. Human eyes are able to compensate one type of light source at the time. Once you are looking at each display separately, the eyes will via the brain automatically adapt to the appropriate light spectrum - so simply use SpyderTune (it's also a part of Spyder5ELITE) to match it as close as possible.

Thanks,
Oliver

It's not Lightroom, it's the Spyder Express edition. You need to upgrade to Elite or Pro.

The Spyder Express is deliberately set up to support a single monitor only. It's about market segmentation. Every time you make a new profile with the Spyder Express, it overwrites any and all previous profiles. There is no way to override or "fool" this configuration, many have tried.