ICC profile editor

Or can anyone tell me how to modify the profile's gamma curve ? Because the spyder-calibrated-profile is considerably brighter than the prints of my photo-lab (even if one considers that paper has no backlight). I would use Adobe Gamma Loader for this, but it says it can't open the .icc file I created with my Spyder because "the selected profile is not a legal RGB display profile".

I see. Thanks, Freeagent. And yes, I specifically answered to Peter's suggestions.

I fully agree with you Peter. That's exactly what I'll do. I have not yet studied the Datacolor Sypder's competitors, but this seems to have a whole new concept (or does X-Rite do the same thing?):

http://www.basiccolor.de/english/Datenblaetter_E/squid_E/squid_E.htm

Or is this humbug ?

Anyway, what I wanted to say is that I need a temporary fix for the next week or so, and then I'll look into a true solution.

Mark,

Please, please, do not edit your monitor profile. It will only serve to confuse your issues and you'll never know exactly where you are, color or calibration wise. In the last 12 years of making hardware calibrated monitor profiles, I have never once encountered a circumstance where the monitor profile needed editing and I can't believe yours does either. What you are trying to do is compensate for bad hardware, and that's not what profile editing is for.

Order yourself up a Gretag/X-Rite calibrator and be done with it.

@Gernot Hoffmann + Peter Figen:
I am currently testing ProfileMaker5's "ProfileEditor". It looks really sophisticated.
For what I'm doing, I guess I need to select:
under A: "One ICC profile"
under B: the profile created by my Spyder-calibration-device. Then choose, RGB->LAB and perceptual.

But then ...?
The only tools available for this selection is Gradations and "profile white point". Given that I want to correct a green cast, can I use the "profile white point" ? I tried both tools, but am a bit clueless ...

@Freeagent: Thanks a lot. I'll try and compare the results. Just to understand the logic behind it ... why would "custom" be more adequate than sRGB ?

@PeterFigen: I know, they shouldn't be edited. Datacolor already exchanged the device, same results. We have problems on several different monitor brands. I feel, Datacolor's calibration doesn't do a good job. Thanks for suggesting ProfileMaker5's Edit Module, I'll try that out.

@Glenn_UK: Thanks for confirming that Photoshop has no such capabilities. And I admit, I didn't quite understand the article I was linking to. I just read "Open Photoshop ... Save as a copy, and create a new icc profile with this file" So I thought, maybe Photoshop has a function I'm not aware of. The problem I experience is that the monitor - after calibration - has a slight green cast (when compared to an industrial greyscale chart). So basically, I wanted to bend the green gamma curve a bit down. I know, that this is not a solution, but I have to get a job done and need this as a temporary fix in the meanwhile ... better than nothing. I will study other calibration devices afterwards, I just don't have the time right now for this work unfortunately.

@GustavoSanchez+Glenn: Thanks for suggesting BasICColor Display4. I'll look into that.

@Freeagtent: I work on an Eizo Flexscan Monitor. It has several predefined working modes: Text, Picture, Movie, Custom, sRGB. Obviously exluding the first three, I settled for sRGB, because in this mode I can only adjust the backlight, nothing else and I thought - or at least hoped - that it would be closest to my calibration target (sRGB) and thus make me achieve the best calibration results (because the less the display output has to be "corrected"/"adjusted", the better). Also, in custom mode, I have several settings and therefore more possibilities to do something "wrong" ... so I thought I stick to sRGB, because there are no parameters and the SpyderCalibration has no parameters in that case either, so at least there's no possiblity for a user-error.
And thanks for thinking about it, but yes, my monitor is warmed up >1 hour and I have the ambient light detection set to off (as suggested by Datacolor's support). I have filed a ticket with them more than 1 month ago and every once in a while I get messages, saying they are sorry, they are still evaluating the problem on it on different systems/monitors, so judging from that, I guess they might have a production problem.

I too think BasICColor Display4 can do very good monitor profiles and it's quite unexpensive for what it does (especially compared with ProfileMaker).

No, I cant think of any way at all you can edit your monitor profile in Photoshop. Your reference was to a not-very-scientific way of compensating for an imperfect scanner profile (basically, rebuilding it having used Curves to change the scanned values it is built on).

Im wondering what it is youre seeing that makes you feel your monitor profile needs adjusting? (Dont forget, any sensor or profiler is limited by what the monitor is physically capable of).

BasICColor Display4 is an excellent monitor/display profiler and does have a fine-tuning edit facility (though Ive never tried it out) You can trial it
here

Good luck
Glenn

Monitor profiles really should never need or be edited. They are what they are, and they're supposed to represent the current state of your calibration. Datacolor should give you another puck if you're not getting dead neutral grays. When you bring up a neutral RGB "gray" ramp in any standardized RGB space, it should appear neutral or very near neutral throughout the tonal range.

I use ProfileMaker 5 too, and the Edit Module in it is one of the best available. There are plenty of times where you need to do a very specific Selective Color tweak to some output profiles. There are also times where I've edited a slightly steeper, and more contrasty, black curve in CMYK profiles for offset presses, but only after seeing that every file needed the same post conversion fix to make them pop.

Profile Editing in general is not something to be taken lightly, and often, "fixing" one thing unfixes something else. If you have the interest and the patience and the real need, editing can put that final touch that takes your output to the next level - just not on the monitor.