Screen & colour calibration

Rose NW wrote: I appreciate this is an endless topic but I'm fed up with photos looking drastically different between Photoshop and the exported versions

It's not an endless topic at all.

Applications with color management, and applications without, will never display identically. Assuming all icc profiles (document and display) are present and correct, the former are right and the latter wrong.

End of topic. It really is that simple.

So what applications, exactly, are you viewing with? Windows "Photos", for example, is not color managed, while "Windows Photo Viewer" is.

For Photoshop to display entirely correctly, it requires a monitor profile that describes the monitor's actual behavior in detail. This is what a calibrator will make. If the profile is inaccurate, Photoshop will display inaccurately. And if the profile is outright defective (which happens), different color managed applications may react differently.

Well, Rose, a couple things here.

First off, not all programs are color managed, so you need to trust the color managed program such as Photoshop. Where you need to become concerned would be significant color shifts between color managed programs, say Photoshop and Lightroom/Camera Raw. That usually indicates a corrupt monitor profile.

Second, while your screen may be calibrated to the standard, most regular folks don't have a calibrated monitor. Each is going to be different - some may be close, others way off.

Third, the built-in hardware calibrator will do an acceptable job (although not as good as a dedicated unit). That said, the laptop monitor itself may not be up to the job. Not all displays are created equal.

Now, all that said, have you used the color calibrator? You'll actually have to do the process yourself - it's not done automatically. To calibrate, type "Pantone Color" into Cortana and open the Pantone Color Calibrator.

I have a Lenovo W541 and have used the inbuilt colour calibration tool - but maybe I shouldn't?

Maybe you should, but with correct procedures? It's hard to figure out what is actually going wrong. Some of the pertinent questions would therefore be:

• What color profile did you/ do you use.
• Was the monitor "neutral" (factory defaults with no color profiles) when you started calibrating it?
• Was the monitor running long enough to be evenly lit 8at least half an hour)?
• Is there any form of multi-screen setup or multiple GPUs?
• Are there any graphics-card specific color tweaks?
• Is there any GPU acceleration involved anywhere?
• What are your proof preview and color profile settings in PS?

Based on my experiences with this recurring subject my gut feeling tells me that perhaps you are using some form of calibration, but not properly setup your proof in PS and some secondary issues like hardware accelerated UI handling in your operating system may be part of the problem, too.

Mylenium