I’ve just received a new laptop, and have found the display calibration from the factory is not to my liking. I’ve been able to create a new profile using displayCal, and have improved the color rendition quite a bit. I still want to ask a couple questions, since most of the time I’ve calibrated desktop monitors for print work, and this machine is primarily for images getting used on the web. The monitor on the laptop is a very bright (500nits) 2k display. Before calibration, I had to lower the brightness to the 35% level to use it comfortably indoors. Tonal rendition seemed way off in the highlights.
My questions are:
What are the best initial settings for the calibration beyond turning all profiling off? I chose D65 130cdm since that’s what I use for print work. The resulting profile was much better in color and tonal rendition, but dark. I had to bump the brightness of the display up to 70% to get a comfortable viewing experience.
There seems to be no way to tweak the monitor to set the initial white points in any manner similar to the OSD on my desktop monitor. I had to skip this step. Is this a huge problem?
I’m working on a Framework 13 laptop with the 2k screen, running Aurora OS ( a Fedora univeralblue derivative). It’s a KDE Plasma6 desktop. The Flatpak displayCal didn’t work, I was able to install the Flatpak from the beta repro successfully.
This isn’t an instance where I’m doing super critical work, but just want to get some reasonable rendition for images being viewed on screen.
Perhaps you can calibrate using the argyllcms “dispcal” command from the commandline?
dispcal -d 1 -t 6500 -b 160 -g 2.2 -yl -v -o MyFilnameForMonitor1
Customise it to your liking, here is a quick description of the arguments of this line you can customise:
* **-d 1**: refers to the display. Eg. use **-d 2** for a second monitor.
* **-b 160** refers to the brightness target in candela meter square, here a 160cd/m²
* **-t 6500** refers to the target temperature, 6500K here.
* **-g 2.2** refers to Gamma 2.2.
After done and following the calibration, you'll end up with MyFilnameForMonitor1.icc (you can customise the name here).
Although perhaps the added complexity of Wayland on Fedora with Plasma 6 may complicate things.
The recommendation seems to be 100-120 cdm, but that’s for an environment with controlled ambient light. Ideally it’s set based on the actual ambient light level. A quick test is to see if your monitor is too bright, is to see if your edited photos are too dark when viewed on a phone.
As long as you’re not doing color critical work and the monitor isn’t terrible, I believe it should be fine. You can always do a verification in DisplayCAL to find out how bad it is.
Color management in Wayland is still not quite there, so depending on the exact version of KDE, configuration and the applications you use, the final result might be off. If you want to be sure that it works, you’ll have to use X11.
I actually ended up generating a good profile with displayCal, and after a week or so, am ok with it for my uses. I noticed that my calibrator was more than 5 years old, so have a new one on it’s way this week, and will generate a new profile and see if fit’s any better.
This computer is just for blogging and social media posts, no critical print work. The display is very nice to work on. Makes me want to update my aging 32" desktop display to 4k.