Internal Monitor Calibration?

#1

Hello Everyone long time no speak.

I have finally been able to move away from Mac and am now on a nice Windows 10 PC with a solid processor and lots of Ram and a nice new Monitor (BenQ SW240).

So now I can finally move to a OpenSource workflow. From past experiments I feel RT and Gimp will fit the way I like to work in general. As for DAM I might create my own simplistic solution as of right now just dumping files to a folder and using exiftool to rename them.

My question is in regards to the way RT handles monitor profiles. This particular monitor calibrates to a internal Chip and allows me to swap between 3 various calibrations with just pressing a button. Right now I have AdobeRGB Absolute, SRGB Absolute, and a SRGB Relative (for sending to my external printing company as they only take SRGB Jpegs).

It seems the software (Pallet Master Element) generates ICC profiles and dumps them in spool\color directory. But writes the LUTS to the monitor. I calibrated under Profile V2 Matrix for maximum software compatibility.

I am not sure how this internal calibration stuff works exactly but it seems that when I change profiles via the monitor it is changing the color conversion without touching whatever the system profile is set to. I would assume this means the monitor itself is handling the conversions? If this is the case is there anything special I need to do in RT to not muck things up?

[EDIT]
Maybe it is better to just ignore the HW calibration and just SW calibrate with DisplayCal?

#2

Hi, I have the same screen as you since a year or so

  1. Use hardware calibration and calibrate to panel native - the native color space is larger than AdobeRGB (advanced calibration settings in PME).

  2. Do not use the third calibration slot - there is a bug and you will loose all 3 calibrations eventually and you probably won’t notice it in the beginning. So only use 2 calibrations, but really you only need 1 (panel native).

  3. Use hardware calibration AND profile the screen after hardware calibration with Displaycal and use the profile that you created with Displaycal for color managed apps. (I am not sure if you know the difference between calibration and profiling.). Anyway the profile that is created by palette master element is unreliable to broken in my experience.

  4. Do use hardware calibration at least once a month. Calibration does change.

  5. This is not so important, but I noticed that the newer versions of PME are broken - they do not measure the brightness correctly, and there were versions of PME between November 2018 and December 2019 that were completely broken. My old version of PME is functional, can share it with you. You will notice that brightness is not measured correctly if you check with Displaycal. Maybe the bug is fixed meanwhile? Nevertheless you can use PME for hardware calibration. I think you need to choose brightess 150 or so if you really want 120.

Hope this helps

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#3

Is there a way to reset the hardware calibration slots? I used 3 before knowing this.

I am not sure if Older PME will support my SpyderX and not sure if display Cal or windows would like 2 different drivers for the calibrator.

I seem to get good results on brightness from the PME verification but if it lies tweaks may be needed. Maybe the newest version is fixed.

I am not sure how to only profile with display Cal but what makes you think PME profiles are broken?

#4

You can overwrite the calibration slots with a new calibration. I am not sure whether they are reset if you reset the screen’s settings to factory default.

Switching between the datacolor and the argyll driver is easy: you change the driver in the device manager in Windows, but I am not sure how it is called in English (click on update driver and choose the driver you need - it’s already in the system, you just need to activate it).

Btw, I have a dual boot system: on Windows the datacalor driver is always active, actually I only need Windows for hardware calibration. And I profile the screen under Linux with Displaycal. That’s what I’d recommend but I am not sure if you are a Linux person.

If you test both the profiles created with PME and Displaycal you will notice that the colors look different. I think the Displaycal profiles are more reliable.

Set all calibration settings in Displaycal to “as measured” - except the settings for brightness (I think it is called white level or something like that) where you set 120 cd or so. Displaycal will then perform the interactive “hardware” calibration - actually it is just for checking whether PME set the brightness correctly, do not actually changethe settings of the screen - and then just jump to profiling, i.e. skip the “software” calibration.

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#5

Ok thanks for the information.

I could technically Linux but I am not sure the PC is supported on all hardware.

I got a workstation from Lenovo with 32gb of RAM and a Quadro p1000. It will probably work but not sure about the wifi/Bluetooth card in it.

#6

Linux will very probably work, even wifi. I have quite a new laptop here, of course Debian stable does not boot (old kernel) but pretty much every other distro does. So now I am on Debian Sid (with nonfree firmware). You can easily test it with a live usb. Hardware support used to be worse, but today it’s pretty good. Only exception is Debian official because it does not include a lot of nonfree firmware.