These kinds of videos are very welcomed. I think the least covered part in gaming hardware is the monitor. Expecting more and more techniques/methodologies based on monitors from you guys!
On the DisplayCAL forums they actually recommend using the default setting (gamma 2.2) above sRGB for web, games and everything. With sRGB as the setting, the resulting gamma curve will make the near-black details less saturated but more visible. It all comes down to preference. If you have a bright screen or you're in a dark room and don't have lots of trouble with backlight bleeding or similar, you'll probably get a better overall result with the default gamma 2.2.
yeah that's correct i've noticed this mistake in the video; unless you have an oled monitor or a monitor with high contrast like maybe a VA panel; you can also still use the srgb profile just change tone curve to 2.2 in the calibration tab
alternatively chose sRGB as shown in the vid and manually go in and change the gamma to "2.2" instead of "sRGB" under calibration settings. Or even easier select "Office & Web (D65, Gamma 2.2) instead of "sRGB"
Gamma 2.2 is the recommended default but it's not a one-size-fits-all. The DisplayCAL dev has advised that people may prefer sRGB for use with sRGB content and apps that are not colour managed. This means that sRGB is more suitable for most of this video's audience. Professionals who primarily use colour-managed apps should stick to gamma 2.2. Hope this helps.
@@Oliver-fy6xy It's the other way around. sRGB is for photo work and 2.2 suits gaming better. sRGB has washed out shadow detail because of the bump in the lower end of the gamma curve. 20 years ago many of us played games on CRT monitors which displayed the equivalent of gamma 2.45 if I remember it correctly. (Very dark, OLED monitors can handle this nowadays but not IPS) Or maybe it was that the sRGB gamma countered the native curve of the CRT monitors? I really can't remember. In the end, I guess just try all the common settings and see what looks best to you on your screen. Many games do have a gamma test picture where it usually says "turn down the gamma until the near-black details are just barely visible".
While I get the limitations on calibrating a monitor without specific tools like these... would love to see a video on how to at least improve calibration a bit aimed at the more general public that doesnt have these tools. It might not make a huge difference or be 100% accurate, but it would at least be usable for the rest of us.
This boils down to your eye and you being used to a certain kind of monitor. If you have a monitor which has been tested and calibrated by others, you can try to copy their profile settings. Sometimes hardware tests provide their monitor calibration settings.
Exactly what I was thinking, most of us won't even have a calibration tool, but if we can improve the quality of the monitor even just by a few percentages by using only software, then that could be an amazing video to watch.
Go to your screen manufacturer website, then support, then downloads, you can find pre-defined ICC profiles for most screens there, Iiyama does that, at least.
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www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/ This is ancient by modern standards, but still great for calibrating by your own eye instead of using any HW apart from the monitor itself. It can also help highlight lots of monitor shortcomings like color gradients and banding, viewing angles, uniformity, stuck pixels, pixel responsiveness...
@@daykeyy I did mean the device. They hire these at camera shops as photographers are a primary market for this stuff. When I checked you could hire per night or for a weekend etc
I think something got lost in translation. In US English, to hire means to pay someone for services. To rent, means to pay for an item for temporary possession. You hire a professional. You rent a car. For our US audience, he meant rent a device.
As somebody well-versed in calibrating and working with monitors I have to commend you on an excellent video. I particularly liked your clear explanation of how gamut mapping works (or doesn't) depending on application as this is a common point of confusion amongst users (12:10). And also the way you stress at several points the importance of doing as much as you can monitor-side in the OSD - very important point. I'd just stress that a 30 minutes warmup period should be considered the absolute minimum. Some models, particularly but not exclusively those with enhanced phosphor backlights, can undergo significant colour temperature changes over a period of ~2 hours. Not always necessary but I'd recommend users wait longer than 30 minutes if possible.
Will calibrating without clamping to srgb on a wide gamut display cause color mistranslation when working on color sensitive work? or should I be fine with calibrating without the clamp.
@@Styrant Gamut mapping is one of the purposes of profiling the monitor. So if you're calibrating it with a colorimeter or similar device and using colour-aware (ICC aware) applications, you're good.
@@qupeter1224 Either would work well, they're both good devices and I use both for my reviews for different purposes. The X-Rite is better for contrast measurements, but both provide good accurate profiles in the end. I'd say the Spyder is the more user-friendly of the two. It has good software included, which provides appropriate feedback to help adjust as much as possible in the OSD even if you don't want to profile fully. It's also very quick at performing the actual calibration and it reports things in a very neat way (which is partly why I like using such reports in my reviews - plus to keep things consistent with older reviews).
Good introduction and manual how to use Display CAL. These guys did a nice job to bring back to live old display calibration hardware and to cover the whole array of displays. For beginners, when adjusting RBG sliders, start with green, then note red and blue work in counterphase and balancing them is easier.
Calibrating my monitors was a night and day difference for my multimonitor setup, it's just so frigging nice when all displays look the same. Even when you buy the same brand and model and have them on the same settings, you can get a big difference in how they look, there's really no way around that other than calibrating. I also managed to get the cost of the device paid off quite handily by offering to calibrate the monitors and displays of friends and family for a small fee. =)
Over the last few weeks, I've been researching what to put in my next pc, part for part, and I've found I ended up on either HW Unboxed or Monitors Unboxed whenever I needed in-depth explanations or clarification on different topics. And here I am, after having purchased all my goods, finally at the stage where I can calibrate my monitor and where do I end up? Back where I started. My setup has come full circle!
Great video. You should consider, if you do profiles with a reference spectrophotometer or spectroradiometer, could you make sure to upload the spectral sample to the database that displaycal is creating. This can be used with hcfr to give more accurate results, and displaycal as well, by including spectral correction for i1 display pro users.
I've always calibrated my screens, it began just for photography, but I believe having a colour accurate display for gaming gets you closer to what the developers envisaged for the final experience, how true that is, I can't say, however.
I would probably point out the brightness settings, as it is a bit of a pet peeve of mine and I frequently see people complaining about monitors being too dim and such. While you absolutely can set your monitor however you like as suggested in the video (presumably to not overcomplicate things), people frequently use monitors set to brightness that's way too high, needlessly hurting their eyes (possibly without even realizing). A good rule of thumb for brightness in my opinion is that the monitor should be set to brightness that's equal to your ambient brightness - it should not stand out (either by being too bright or too dim). For sRGB work, brightness of 120 cd/m2 is generally considered "normal" for a graphic workstation, which equals to moderately lit to low light working environment with no direct light and no sunlight. This is a lot lower than many monitors default to, even in sRGB mode - especially gaming monitors, which frequently try to impress the user with bright colors. Obviously this is just a starting point, so you should adjust this according to your lighting conditions - you'll want to go lower in darker rooms (and avoid using the monitor in complete darkness - simply for the sake of your eyes - a bit of bias lighting goes a long way and also improves the apparent contrast of your monitor) and higher in brighter rooms, but again, don't go crazy unless really needed. (Personally, I generally use around 140 cd/m2, as was shown in the video, as it fits my lighting situation well, but can go even below 100 if I turn down some lights.)
Absolutely brilliant video! I got a Calibrite the other day, used it and it rendered horrible results with a massive green tint. This video clearly showed what I'd missed and how to correct it. Thanks heaps!
I posted a while ago about this but now I'm 100% sure. Do NOT choose sRGB unless you want a preset for editing photos in that format. sRGB doesn't have a flat gamma curve but a small bump near the lower end which means you'll get washed out shadow detail. For those who would say "everything is made for sRGB on PC" that's not true. The most common standard is 2.2 (or sometimes 2.22) and is why lots of games have a gamma preview window where they ask you to set it so the dark object on screen is barely visible above the black background. Other common settings if you're in a completely dark room are 2.35 and 2.4. And in digital cinema with wide color gamuts they even use 2.6 but that's in a completely lightless environment. Another tip: Only go for BT.1886 gamma if you have an OLED. It'll look as washed out as sRGB if not worse on an IPS or similar since it also has a bump near the lower end. EDIT: The reason even using the term sRGB these days about PC monitors is wrong is because it was designed for CRT monitors which have a native gamma of 2.35-2.5 if I remember this correctly. That's a lot darker which means the sRGB bump in the lower end of the gamma curve was a good way to make shadow detail more visible, I guess.
But how come I am experiencing the saturated colors when calibrating for gamma 2.2? I have a wide gamma display, mini-led display. How to overcome the saturation? Clamp to sRGB in the monitor's OSD while having a gamma 2.2 calibrated icc activated?
@@jonstrup When you calibrate, you only truly calibrate the video card gamma table so the grayscale is as correct as possible. The ICC color profile created with the calibration can be used by many different softwares to give you correct colors too, I think Chrome and Edge browsers use the profile but not 100% sure. What you get is your graphics card displaying a correct grayscale around which the colors are centered. (The color of complete black might vary depending on the type of panel and correcting it would make it brighter so that's not generally recommended.) For watching movies, there's MadVR, a plugin for MPC-HC for which one can create a 3D look-up table (3D LUT) so that it also displays all colors as accurately as possible. Look for a guide on that if interested. My own monitor, an Acer XV240Y only has a slightly larger gamut coverage than sRGB by default so I can handle playing games with the tiny oversaturation. It's worse for those with a monitor closer to 100% DCI-P3, which can of course be amazing if you watch UHD movies but would make games very oversaturated. In gaming, there aren't many games that support ICC profiles or 3D LUTs. There, it first comes down to if your monitor has an sRGB mode that will clamp the colors to that colorspace. Sadly, most monitor manufacturers don't take things seriously when it comes to their sRGB color gamut mode. On my monitor the sRGB mode locks the brightness at 30 and it can't be changed. Neither can the white point RGB balance. I play games with the brightness at 7 and work/web at 0. Anything above 7 is way too bright for me since I'm in a dark/dim environment. So in my case the sRGB mode becomes unusable. If your sRGB mode is acceptable, turn it on before doing a calibration. If your sRGB mode allows you to change brightness, contrast and white balance, it's great and how it should be. There might also be a way in the monitor's service menu (Search around for how to access it on your model and be very careful if changing settings) to make additional settings. If you have an AMD graphics card I think there's also a way to clamp sRGB in their driver, search around. In fact, all monitor manufacturers could easily implement 3D HSL (Hue, saturation and luminance) controls into their firmware so one could do a calibration on hardware level and simply swap between calibrations on the monitor itself. Or graphics cards could support 3D LUTs.
My laptop has sRGB, Adobe RGB, DCI P3, and a Samsung native profile. What happens to these after a create a new profile from the calibration? Do I have to calibrate each one? There's no brightness or contrast controls or white balance. Well I think the Intel Graphics Command Center has this but don't know if it's meant for that.
True but that might not be the way the creator intended the image to look. That said, every eye and brain interprets what it sees differently so they will always be an margin of error.
That's very important for content creators to be sure that the color they choose match the color they see on the screen. It's even more important when you do printing jobs as you also want to use accurately a CMYK calibration profile.
I have an LG GL850 and I honestly find the sRGB clamp to be very useful. I primarily use my display for general gaming and office work but occasionally need to work on graphics and photos. As Tim said, ICC profiles can be a bit finicky in games and some software so it's nice to be able to make an sRGB profile while using the clamp to ensure correct saturation on the desktop
Watching this now as we finally need it, and I wish you went over the results as well in this video. We keep getting results that are worse than what we started with and a guide on how to interpret the calibration settings we ended up with would help a lot in pinpointing what may have gone wrong.
I have a Spyder, but I always just used the included calibration software. The results seemed fine, but I'll try following this guide and see how it goes.
The spyderx pro isn't working well with displaycal. I sent the one i bought for this very purpose back out of anger and got the x-rite ipro instead and it works exactly like shown in the video. What I'm doing is calibrating my monitor and then just send the thing back. If the 200 price range is too much you can resort to this method.
I understand that your comment is from 7 months ago so I don't know if things have changed, but I just used DisplayCAL with my SpyderX Pro. And while "correction" still only gives me the Auto or None options, on the right hand side next to "Instrument" I have 4 modes to choose from and one of them is the LCD PFS Phosphor.
Good beginners guide to calibration with all the basics covered very well. However there are two settings that need to be explained as they are not very intuitive; brightness and contrast. Brightness sets the light output near black, called black level. Contrast sets the light output near full white, called white level. Displays may additionally have a backlight control that will affect light output across the board. This is at least how these controls are supposed to work, but some (or many?) PC monitors don't adhere to this. Brightness is calibrated by eye with a test pattern (near black). The same is also mostly true for contrast (near full white clipping test). It is very important to start with setting these levels properly, and to re-check after first calibration pass. I have used the X-Rite i1 Display Pro on both my plasma and PC monitor. As several others have commented I found that ICC profiles don't work very well if you mostly play games. Just stick to adjusting the controls on the monitor. More on white and black levels at the start of this forum post www.curtpalme.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=35322
@JahonCross No, but there hasn't been an update for years. I'm not sure if newer hardware is compatible and its profile loader doesn't seem to work on the latest Windows versions, at least it's true with my system.
Might be good to mention, that some colorimeters (a far as I know Spyder range and I1 Display2) use organic pigment in filters. Such pigment can degrade over time, rendering device useless. From information that i managed to find, i1Display Pro uses non organic pigment. From personal experience, mine old one(~5 years) produces similar results to a new one (recently bought for company). While Spyder 3 completely died within 2 years.
Yes the old I1's (egg shape) used organic filters (gel) that would degrade over time. The new ones (which look like in this video) use non-organic filters (like glass) that won't degrade. I bough a used I1 display pro for 100€ a few years ago and never had problems with it. I hope the spyder ones got improved in the same way. Buying used is a lot safer with these improvements.
@@renauddelorme mine was first hand, same model as yours, 7 years ago... it "seems" to be working fine... I'm getting the full circle well as usual (screen-->printed results, etc)
Thank you very much for this clear and short explanation about how to use DisplayCal. I still have one question though: You made the point that the colorimeter should be flush with the display to avoid any leakage. What if I have a curved monitor?
Just a little heads up, when adjusting the luminance after adjusting the white balance, use the backlight control and not brightness. Brightness is used to adjust black level of the display, not the luminance.
Thx Tim. I downloaded DisplayCAL way back in January but never got around to trying it out. Seems simple enuff. Time to dig out my Spyder and give it a whirl.
When you calibrate a display for the second time, should you then change the ICC back to what it was when you first got the monitor, or do you keep the display on the new ICC you made the first go around?
When setting up and you choose your Correction, you can actually download the exact correction for your monitor. Like my G7 had a correction made for it.
You missed mentioning that for most people you need to calibrate to D65 aka 6500K white point. Also since you own the colorimeter you can add more patches to calibrate to.
@@liaminwales yeah i know because of the profile, but he should have mentioned these so people can learn what we are actually doing and not just follow blind steps
@@St0RM33 if people relay care there is google. dont make something super complex when people dont need it. taran from ltt has some fun videos on calibration
Thanks for this video. My idisplaypro has been over 6 months in my closet. I bought it used for 50€ and it's been calibrated or compared to new pro plus with delta's under 1. Never used it before but watching this video made me think about using it to do calibration on my LG GK850F-B and maybe I will do my LG B8 55" oled later.
Hey just a quick heads up there’s a X-Rite i1Studio Spectrophotometer that goes for about $500. Added benefit that it can also create custom printer paper profiles, for you printer. Also you might as well get the new i1 display pro plus model. As it adds a lot of new features for about $50 usually around $300, or just wait for a sale on the display pro model. Keep up the great work guys
I'm just getting into this and have read the Plus supports higher nits and as a result is not as good as the older model at do very low brightness calibrations. The sensors are either good at lower brightness or higher brightness, but not both. IIRC, they suggest getting the older 1000 nit limit ones even unless you have a crazy bright monitor, and to still use the 1000 nit limit ones for all TVs. All that being said, of all the high nit models out there, the Calibrite ColorChecker Display Plus is the best at calibrating low nit displays, though still not as good as the 1000 nit models.
Thanks for this, I actually have an i1 Pro in my Amazon wishlist, waiting for a price drop/promotion, with 7 displays in my house (not including phones/tablets), it would be nice to have consistent colors on all of them (even if not 100% accurate, but better than the random bluer/less bluer images that I'm getting now). I tried some manual adjustment based on my eyes and holding a piece of paper near the monitor, but that's obviously very imprecise... Now that I've seen how easy it actually is, I'll certainly grab it at the next opportunity and start the work on all my displays ;)
i got mine on sale, they do get a nice sale once or twice a year. the spider unit is not bad to, look at the display cal site. they have a relay nice list of units you can buy with descriptions and pro/cons for each unit the paper thing will not work, the paper will look 'white' but that's just your eyes normalising the ambient light. the human eye will normalise colour casts in changing light conditions
This is super detailed and thorough. Thanks a lot.
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Perfect timing. I bought the i1 Display Pro two days ago. A free alternative to Calman is HCFR, which has no automation or ICC generation, but you can use it to get proper measurements (RGB, CIE, gamma, luminance graphs etc).
@@matrixfull I calibrate per month... and often every two months (doesn't vary that much, if at all)... but I do illustration (and in a lower percentage of gigs, design), not high end photography... Never crossed my mind going for such gig... calibrating other people's devices, lol. Hard to get enough clients for that, surely :D
I appreciate this video and is leading me to get these tools as I see the difference you made and I can now see my monitors are horrible as are the people I know so thank you and look forward to the advanced steps.
Digital Storm professionally calibrated my laptop display before shipping it to me and I guess they used X-Rite because there was a folder with iProfiler software in the start menu. I just avoid messing with it because I have no idea. I'm guessing it's just software used to load calibrated color profiles for the display.
best thing to do is not touch it. if you ever want to reinstall windows backup the ICC profile so you can re use it later. cool to get a pre calibrated display.
I've been told that, depending on where you live, it's possible to rent calibration tools from photography oriented shops. I guess they usually rent them to photographers who use Photoshop or Lightroom, but it's worth giving a shop like that a call. Even if the shop you call doesn't rent the tools they might be able to refer to someone who does.
Just bought myself an i1Display Pro to play to keep me ticking over until I can actually buy a new CPU and GPU when they're properly in stock. I've been itching to calibrate my monitor for a few years now but wasn't able to justify spending that much on a calibrator when my previous monitor was a TN panel. Super excited to start generating ICC profiles/3D LUTs for Windows, MadVR, reshade for games and whatever else I can find.
@@iceyberq I guess it depends if your the "glass half full" or "glass half empty" kinda person 😂 I understand the reason for it though. People look for common numbers, when searching for a product, i.e; $100, $500, $1000, etc. if they don't find anything there, then they tend to search for the middle of those numbers, such as, $250, $750, etc. So if they titled it "$600..." or even "Under $600...", then it may get overlooked. It sucks, but just blame how algorithms work/feed info to consumers.
G'day Tim, I'm not planning on Calibrating my 1080p@60Hz monitor, but I still found it really interesting to see how it is done & understand more of what you do during testing monitors for reviews
Dammit Tim. It's 1am Hawaii time. Guess I'll be late to work tomorrow haha. We've been waiting a long time for this video from you! I don't even own a PC, but I need to watch this! Keep up the awesome work guys!
I just signed up for your Patreon page and as I was logging in for the very first time I get a message saying my account was suspended for suspicious activity. WTF??!! I hadn't even been on it once. what a kick in the nuts..... Those folks over there at Patreon must be some mean SOB's. So sorry guys. I was really looking forward to being a part of your community.
eagerly awaiting a more in-depth guide covering types of monitor backlights (WLED / PFS Phosphor WLED / RGB LED) and how those pair with getting calibrated with spectrometers vs colorimeters. fingers crossed.
there's lots of guides on the geeky side of film forums. simply in part your changing the display's settings to match close to correct during the proses. i have mixed feelings about the value for a Tv, relay depends on what Tv you have. a lost of tv's will have a cinema or netflix mode which is fairly good. look at a YT channel called 'hdtvtest' if your relay interested.
For those of you having trouble getting your device working with DisplayCAL... Start. Hold Shift Key. Restart ( continue holding shift key ). Start Up Options. Restart system without driver signature enforcement. Open Display Cal. Then do everything he says in the Video. You should be good after that.
I really wish all monitors had a standard USB "debug" port, and a protocol so that calibration tools could hook into those and flash profiles to the monitor directly. that seems like it'd be a useful thing.
I love this channel since it gives all the information you need very clearly. I was looking for reviews on monitor and videos from this channel is the most helpful and easy to understand. They still need to should put the product's name on screen though.
If you'd prefer a Spectrophotometer for monitor and other calibration work, you can get one for about $500, by searching on Ebay for "es-2000". It's a private label rebrand of the I1 Pro2, but since few people outside of the printing industry know that name, you can get it for half the price. The downside is you don't get a monitor calibration software included, (i1 profiler is good, but finicky) but you could buy one, or use one of the several free profiling software packages for your monitor.
I have an EFI es-1000 I bought on ebay to correct my colorimeter. ColorHCFR is a good free calibration software if you need one for advanced calibrations.
I don't need no stinking colour calibration! Tim's purple sweatshirt looks just right on my monitor!
isnt it green?
Wait is that a sweatshirt? I see a bunch of pixels don't know
There is no sweatshirt
😆 LOL. May be your eyes need calibration.
@@nitiningle1991 r/woosh
These kinds of videos are very welcomed. I think the least covered part in gaming hardware is the monitor. Expecting more and more techniques/methodologies based on monitors from you guys!
On the DisplayCAL forums they actually recommend using the default setting (gamma 2.2) above sRGB for web, games and everything. With sRGB as the setting, the resulting gamma curve will make the near-black details less saturated but more visible. It all comes down to preference. If you have a bright screen or you're in a dark room and don't have lots of trouble with backlight bleeding or similar, you'll probably get a better overall result with the default gamma 2.2.
yeah that's correct i've noticed this mistake in the video; unless you have an oled monitor or a monitor with high contrast like maybe a VA panel; you can also still use the srgb profile just change tone curve to 2.2 in the calibration tab
I think you also have to change the target whitepoint setting, if u are using this method.
alternatively chose sRGB as shown in the vid and manually go in and change the gamma to "2.2" instead of "sRGB" under calibration settings. Or even easier select "Office & Web (D65, Gamma 2.2) instead of "sRGB"
Gamma 2.2 is the recommended default but it's not a one-size-fits-all. The DisplayCAL dev has advised that people may prefer sRGB for use with sRGB content and apps that are not colour managed. This means that sRGB is more suitable for most of this video's audience. Professionals who primarily use colour-managed apps should stick to gamma 2.2. Hope this helps.
@@Oliver-fy6xy It's the other way around. sRGB is for photo work and 2.2 suits gaming better. sRGB has washed out shadow detail because of the bump in the lower end of the gamma curve. 20 years ago many of us played games on CRT monitors which displayed the equivalent of gamma 2.45 if I remember it correctly. (Very dark, OLED monitors can handle this nowadays but not IPS)
Or maybe it was that the sRGB gamma countered the native curve of the CRT monitors? I really can't remember.
In the end, I guess just try all the common settings and see what looks best to you on your screen. Many games do have a gamma test picture where it usually says "turn down the gamma until the near-black details are just barely visible".
This is so weird. I was looking for a high quality version of exactly this type of video less than 12 hours ago. And here we are.
Same :s
Garrus: looks like these monitors need some calibrations.
Unexpected reference
or his visor needs cleaning
can it wait for a bit im in the middle of some calibrations
Also Garrus: I've been calibrating these dang monitors all day and they still can't give me a firing solution.
Alright, ya got me, what reference is this?
While I get the limitations on calibrating a monitor without specific tools like these... would love to see a video on how to at least improve calibration a bit aimed at the more general public that doesnt have these tools. It might not make a huge difference or be 100% accurate, but it would at least be usable for the rest of us.
This boils down to your eye and you being used to a certain kind of monitor.
If you have a monitor which has been tested and calibrated by others, you can try to copy their profile settings.
Sometimes hardware tests provide their monitor calibration settings.
Exactly what I was thinking, most of us won't even have a calibration tool, but if we can improve the quality of the monitor even just by a few percentages by using only software, then that could be an amazing video to watch.
Go to your screen manufacturer website, then support, then downloads, you can find pre-defined ICC profiles for most screens there, Iiyama does that, at least.
www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/ This is ancient by modern standards, but still great for calibrating by your own eye instead of using any HW apart from the monitor itself. It can also help highlight lots of monitor shortcomings like color gradients and banding, viewing angles, uniformity, stuck pixels, pixel responsiveness...
I try using white paper as reference but it still very hard things to do
You can hire these devices (at least in Australia) from camera shops at pretty reasonable prices.
You mean, hire photographer to calibrate monitor ??
@@ZAR556 yes because they edit stuff themselves so they might know calibration.
@@ZAR556 I think he means the calibration device
@@daykeyy I did mean the device. They hire these at camera shops as photographers are a primary market for this stuff. When I checked you could hire per night or for a weekend etc
I think something got lost in translation. In US English, to hire means to pay someone for services. To rent, means to pay for an item for temporary possession. You hire a professional. You rent a car. For our US audience, he meant rent a device.
As somebody well-versed in calibrating and working with monitors I have to commend you on an excellent video. I particularly liked your clear explanation of how gamut mapping works (or doesn't) depending on application as this is a common point of confusion amongst users (12:10). And also the way you stress at several points the importance of doing as much as you can monitor-side in the OSD - very important point. I'd just stress that a 30 minutes warmup period should be considered the absolute minimum. Some models, particularly but not exclusively those with enhanced phosphor backlights, can undergo significant colour temperature changes over a period of ~2 hours. Not always necessary but I'd recommend users wait longer than 30 minutes if possible.
Will calibrating without clamping to srgb on a wide gamut display cause color mistranslation when working on color sensitive work? or should I be fine with calibrating without the clamp.
@@Styrant Gamut mapping is one of the purposes of profiling the monitor. So if you're calibrating it with a colorimeter or similar device and using colour-aware (ICC aware) applications, you're good.
@@PCMonitors makes sense. Thanks!
what would you recommend, spyderx pro or i1 pro. not a professional photo editor or video editor but want to improve my monitor and tv
@@qupeter1224 Either would work well, they're both good devices and I use both for my reviews for different purposes. The X-Rite is better for contrast measurements, but both provide good accurate profiles in the end. I'd say the Spyder is the more user-friendly of the two. It has good software included, which provides appropriate feedback to help adjust as much as possible in the OSD even if you don't want to profile fully. It's also very quick at performing the actual calibration and it reports things in a very neat way (which is partly why I like using such reports in my reviews - plus to keep things consistent with older reviews).
Good introduction and manual how to use Display CAL. These guys did a nice job to bring back to live old display calibration hardware and to cover the whole array of displays. For beginners, when adjusting RBG sliders, start with green, then note red and blue work in counterphase and balancing them is easier.
Thanks!
Calibrating my monitors was a night and day difference for my multimonitor setup, it's just so frigging nice when all displays look the same. Even when you buy the same brand and model and have them on the same settings, you can get a big difference in how they look, there's really no way around that other than calibrating. I also managed to get the cost of the device paid off quite handily by offering to calibrate the monitors and displays of friends and family for a small fee. =)
Over the last few weeks, I've been researching what to put in my next pc, part for part, and I've found I ended up on either HW Unboxed or Monitors Unboxed whenever I needed in-depth explanations or clarification on different topics. And here I am, after having purchased all my goods, finally at the stage where I can calibrate my monitor and where do I end up? Back where I started. My setup has come full circle!
Great video. You should consider, if you do profiles with a reference spectrophotometer or spectroradiometer, could you make sure to upload the spectral sample to the database that displaycal is creating. This can be used with hcfr to give more accurate results, and displaycal as well, by including spectral correction for i1 display pro users.
Excellent Video! There is a noticeable change in quality after calibration using a colorimeter . Thank you for this!
I've always calibrated my screens, it began just for photography, but I believe having a colour accurate display for gaming gets you closer to what the developers envisaged for the final experience, how true that is, I can't say, however.
most games ignore the software icc profile, but it is still good to have the monitor hardware calibrated
I would probably point out the brightness settings, as it is a bit of a pet peeve of mine and I frequently see people complaining about monitors being too dim and such. While you absolutely can set your monitor however you like as suggested in the video (presumably to not overcomplicate things), people frequently use monitors set to brightness that's way too high, needlessly hurting their eyes (possibly without even realizing).
A good rule of thumb for brightness in my opinion is that the monitor should be set to brightness that's equal to your ambient brightness - it should not stand out (either by being too bright or too dim). For sRGB work, brightness of 120 cd/m2 is generally considered "normal" for a graphic workstation, which equals to moderately lit to low light working environment with no direct light and no sunlight.
This is a lot lower than many monitors default to, even in sRGB mode - especially gaming monitors, which frequently try to impress the user with bright colors. Obviously this is just a starting point, so you should adjust this according to your lighting conditions - you'll want to go lower in darker rooms (and avoid using the monitor in complete darkness - simply for the sake of your eyes - a bit of bias lighting goes a long way and also improves the apparent contrast of your monitor) and higher in brighter rooms, but again, don't go crazy unless really needed. (Personally, I generally use around 140 cd/m2, as was shown in the video, as it fits my lighting situation well, but can go even below 100 if I turn down some lights.)
This is what I've been waiting for,
Thank you monitor Guru!
Absolutely brilliant video!
I got a Calibrite the other day, used it and it rendered horrible results with a massive green tint. This video clearly showed what I'd missed and how to correct it. Thanks heaps!
I posted a while ago about this but now I'm 100% sure. Do NOT choose sRGB unless you want a preset for editing photos in that format. sRGB doesn't have a flat gamma curve but a small bump near the lower end which means you'll get washed out shadow detail. For those who would say "everything is made for sRGB on PC" that's not true. The most common standard is 2.2 (or sometimes 2.22) and is why lots of games have a gamma preview window where they ask you to set it so the dark object on screen is barely visible above the black background. Other common settings if you're in a completely dark room are 2.35 and 2.4. And in digital cinema with wide color gamuts they even use 2.6 but that's in a completely lightless environment. Another tip: Only go for BT.1886 gamma if you have an OLED. It'll look as washed out as sRGB if not worse on an IPS or similar since it also has a bump near the lower end.
EDIT: The reason even using the term sRGB these days about PC monitors is wrong is because it was designed for CRT monitors which have a native gamma of 2.35-2.5 if I remember this correctly. That's a lot darker which means the sRGB bump in the lower end of the gamma curve was a good way to make shadow detail more visible, I guess.
That was helpful.
But how come I am experiencing the saturated colors when calibrating for gamma 2.2? I have a wide gamma display, mini-led display. How to overcome the saturation? Clamp to sRGB in the monitor's OSD while having a gamma 2.2 calibrated icc activated?
@@jonstrup When you calibrate, you only truly calibrate the video card gamma table so the grayscale is as correct as possible. The ICC color profile created with the calibration can be used by many different softwares to give you correct colors too, I think Chrome and Edge browsers use the profile but not 100% sure.
What you get is your graphics card displaying a correct grayscale around which the colors are centered. (The color of complete black might vary depending on the type of panel and correcting it would make it brighter so that's not generally recommended.)
For watching movies, there's MadVR, a plugin for MPC-HC for which one can create a 3D look-up table (3D LUT) so that it also displays all colors as accurately as possible. Look for a guide on that if interested.
My own monitor, an Acer XV240Y only has a slightly larger gamut coverage than sRGB by default so I can handle playing games with the tiny oversaturation. It's worse for those with a monitor closer to 100% DCI-P3, which can of course be amazing if you watch UHD movies but would make games very oversaturated.
In gaming, there aren't many games that support ICC profiles or 3D LUTs. There, it first comes down to if your monitor has an sRGB mode that will clamp the colors to that colorspace. Sadly, most monitor manufacturers don't take things seriously when it comes to their sRGB color gamut mode. On my monitor the sRGB mode locks the brightness at 30 and it can't be changed. Neither can the white point RGB balance. I play games with the brightness at 7 and work/web at 0. Anything above 7 is way too bright for me since I'm in a dark/dim environment. So in my case the sRGB mode becomes unusable.
If your sRGB mode is acceptable, turn it on before doing a calibration. If your sRGB mode allows you to change brightness, contrast and white balance, it's great and how it should be. There might also be a way in the monitor's service menu (Search around for how to access it on your model and be very careful if changing settings) to make additional settings.
If you have an AMD graphics card I think there's also a way to clamp sRGB in their driver, search around.
In fact, all monitor manufacturers could easily implement 3D HSL (Hue, saturation and luminance) controls into their firmware so one could do a calibration on hardware level and simply swap between calibrations on the monitor itself.
Or graphics cards could support 3D LUTs.
My laptop has sRGB, Adobe RGB, DCI P3, and a Samsung native profile. What happens to these after a create a new profile from the calibration? Do I have to calibrate each one? There's no brightness or contrast controls or white balance. Well I think the Intel Graphics Command Center has this but don't know if it's meant for that.
@You2Too so do you recommend using the gamma 2.2 preset for games? That's my main use (i have an lg ips monitor)
2 minutes ago? Dream come true.
Oh my god you're actually doing it! Thank you so much, I always wanted to see your process and it's hard to find information well laid out like yours
Welcome to Hardron Box!!!
I swear "Hard-on Bucks" is coming soon and Pornhub is gonna be so proud of its big bro UA-cam.
The "Large Hardon Collider" appeared several times in scientific documents made by CERN.
As far as I am concerned, it never gets old.
New merch anyone?
@@TheBackyardChemist KEK
Thank you so much for setting up your video with chapters. I hope this becomes contagious.
Thanks for posting this. It was a great help the first time calibrating my displays and now after around 2 years the second time.
Excellent guide! I've been meaning to buy a i1 Display Pro Plus for a while now.
usually, after some time my eyes calibrate to the screen :P
Yea I don't need a $250 device to tell me what looks good to my eyes.
True but that might not be the way the creator intended the image to look.
That said, every eye and brain interprets what it sees differently so they will always be an margin of error.
That's very important for content creators to be sure that the color they choose match the color they see on the screen. It's even more important when you do printing jobs as you also want to use accurately a CMYK calibration profile.
@@jbscotchman You don't need to calibrate your monitor unless you produce video or images that you intend others to see.
@@jbscotchman what you don't know does hurt you
I have an LG GL850 and I honestly find the sRGB clamp to be very useful. I primarily use my display for general gaming and office work but occasionally need to work on graphics and photos. As Tim said, ICC profiles can be a bit finicky in games and some software so it's nice to be able to make an sRGB profile while using the clamp to ensure correct saturation on the desktop
An incredible guide. Thank you for taking the time to make it. I'd also like you to share your experience with CalMAN in a future video
Comprehensive and yet easy to follow. Thank you!
Watching this now as we finally need it, and I wish you went over the results as well in this video. We keep getting results that are worse than what we started with and a guide on how to interpret the calibration settings we ended up with would help a lot in pinpointing what may have gone wrong.
Don't change the RGB settings in the monitor, unless it's a professional monitor. It completely messes things up, if you go over +- 3% per color.
I have a Spyder, but I always just used the included calibration software. The results seemed fine, but I'll try following this guide and see how it goes.
Thank you, ive been waiting for something simple to follow
Question: What if my correction options are only "none" and "auto" ? How do I get the LCD PFS Phosphor WLED, RGB LED ?!
Have the same issue. Using SpyderX Pro. Did you ever figure out how to get other corrections?
@@pixelbat same and same issue.
The spyderx pro isn't working well with displaycal. I sent the one i bought for this very purpose back out of anger and got the x-rite ipro instead and it works exactly like shown in the video. What I'm doing is calibrating my monitor and then just send the thing back. If the 200 price range is too much you can resort to this method.
@@skulley6361 lmaoo damn.
I understand that your comment is from 7 months ago so I don't know if things have changed, but I just used DisplayCAL with my SpyderX Pro. And while "correction" still only gives me the Auto or None options, on the right hand side next to "Instrument" I have 4 modes to choose from and one of them is the LCD PFS Phosphor.
Good beginners guide to calibration with all the basics covered very well. However there are two settings that need to be explained as they are not very intuitive; brightness and contrast. Brightness sets the light output near black, called black level. Contrast sets the light output near full white, called white level. Displays may additionally have a backlight control that will affect light output across the board. This is at least how these controls are supposed to work, but some (or many?) PC monitors don't adhere to this. Brightness is calibrated by eye with a test pattern (near black). The same is also mostly true for contrast (near full white clipping test). It is very important to start with setting these levels properly, and to re-check after first calibration pass. I have used the X-Rite i1 Display Pro on both my plasma and PC monitor. As several others have commented I found that ICC profiles don't work very well if you mostly play games. Just stick to adjusting the controls on the monitor. More on white and black levels at the start of this forum post www.curtpalme.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=35322
THANKS GUYS YOU'RE THE BEST!! ❤❤❤
Love your content man 💗
Can you make an updated monitor calibration video? DisplayCAL has been abandoned years ago apparently.
What do you mean? Did they remove the site?
@JahonCross No, but there hasn't been an update for years. I'm not sure if newer hardware is compatible and its profile loader doesn't seem to work on the latest Windows versions, at least it's true with my system.
Might be good to mention, that some colorimeters (a far as I know Spyder range and I1 Display2) use organic pigment in filters.
Such pigment can degrade over time, rendering device useless.
From information that i managed to find, i1Display Pro uses non organic pigment.
From personal experience, mine old one(~5 years) produces similar results to a new one (recently bought for company). While Spyder 3 completely died within 2 years.
Yes the old I1's (egg shape) used organic filters (gel) that would degrade over time. The new ones (which look like in this video) use non-organic filters (like glass) that won't degrade.
I bough a used I1 display pro for 100€ a few years ago and never had problems with it.
I hope the spyder ones got improved in the same way. Buying used is a lot safer with these improvements.
@@renauddelorme mine was first hand, same model as yours, 7 years ago... it "seems" to be working fine... I'm getting the full circle well as usual (screen-->printed results, etc)
Thank you very much for this clear and short explanation about how to use DisplayCal.
I still have one question though: You made the point that the colorimeter should be flush with the display to avoid any leakage. What if I have a curved monitor?
Very nice guide Tim, thank you!
next to correction is a button to check for user submitted colorimeter corrections btw, could be better if available
Just a little heads up, when adjusting the luminance after adjusting the white balance, use the backlight control and not brightness. Brightness is used to adjust black level of the display, not the luminance.
from my experience, brightness adjusts black level at above 50, and white level at below 50
Thx Tim. I downloaded DisplayCAL way back in January but never got around to trying it out. Seems simple enuff. Time to dig out my Spyder and give it a whirl.
Thanks you a lot for the video, it does clear up a lot of my confusion about color calibration. Hope you got a great day!
I have been waiting for someone to do this video and I am glad it was you guys!
I have been waiting for this video for a very long time! Tim you are the man and keep up the great work!
Great video. I used my i1Dp and calibrated using DisplayCal.
When you calibrate a display for the second time, should you then change the ICC back to what it was when you first got the monitor, or do you keep the display on the new ICC you made the first go around?
When setting up and you choose your Correction, you can actually download the exact correction for your monitor. Like my G7 had a correction made for it.
You missed mentioning that for most people you need to calibrate to D65 aka 6500K white point. Also since you own the colorimeter you can add more patches to calibrate to.
display cal with his settings will do it correct, for most people you dont want to change anything he did not
@@liaminwales yeah i know because of the profile, but he should have mentioned these so people can learn what we are actually doing and not just follow blind steps
@@St0RM33 if people relay care there is google.
dont make something super complex when people dont need it.
taran from ltt has some fun videos on calibration
Thanks for this video. My idisplaypro has been over 6 months in my closet. I bought it used for 50€ and it's been calibrated or compared to new pro plus with delta's under 1. Never used it before but watching this video made me think about using it to do calibration on my LG GK850F-B and maybe I will do my LG B8 55" oled later.
Hey just a quick heads up there’s a X-Rite i1Studio Spectrophotometer that goes for about $500. Added benefit that it can also create custom printer paper profiles, for you printer.
Also you might as well get the new i1 display pro plus model. As it adds a lot of new features for about $50 usually around $300, or just wait for a sale on the display pro model.
Keep up the great work guys
I'm just getting into this and have read the Plus supports higher nits and as a result is not as good as the older model at do very low brightness calibrations. The sensors are either good at lower brightness or higher brightness, but not both. IIRC, they suggest getting the older 1000 nit limit ones even unless you have a crazy bright monitor, and to still use the 1000 nit limit ones for all TVs. All that being said, of all the high nit models out there, the Calibrite ColorChecker Display Plus is the best at calibrating low nit displays, though still not as good as the 1000 nit models.
Excellent tutorial, straight to the point, easy to follow, simplified explanations!
Thanks for this, I actually have an i1 Pro in my Amazon wishlist, waiting for a price drop/promotion, with 7 displays in my house (not including phones/tablets), it would be nice to have consistent colors on all of them (even if not 100% accurate, but better than the random bluer/less bluer images that I'm getting now).
I tried some manual adjustment based on my eyes and holding a piece of paper near the monitor, but that's obviously very imprecise...
Now that I've seen how easy it actually is, I'll certainly grab it at the next opportunity and start the work on all my displays ;)
i got mine on sale, they do get a nice sale once or twice a year.
the spider unit is not bad to, look at the display cal site.
they have a relay nice list of units you can buy with descriptions and pro/cons for each unit
the paper thing will not work, the paper will look 'white' but that's just your eyes normalising the ambient light.
the human eye will normalise colour casts in changing light conditions
This is good content. Nice to see a quality tutorial on monitor calibration
I love the harbor boxed hoodie. Great sense of humor
Great guide. I'm tempted to buy a calibration tool now.
This is super detailed and thorough.
Thanks a lot.
Perfect timing. I bought the i1 Display Pro two days ago.
A free alternative to Calman is HCFR, which has no automation or ICC generation, but you can use it to get proper measurements (RGB, CIE, gamma, luminance graphs etc).
Should you disable HDR feature on the monitor before calibrating?
I have a question: is display calibration worth it if you're not doing professional work that requires it? E.g. if you're just doing gaming.
Yeah it kinda is if you playing story mode games
Simple and Cheaper option,
Hire Monitor Calibration Service on your local Town
Graphic guys and gals always looking for a gig
For those working in creative world calibrating every 2 weeks is standard. Would you hire it every 2 weeks? I am not so sure that's a great deal.
@@matrixfull if you need consistent color accuracy for your usage, you better get your own calibration tool then.
Yeah my town doesnt have any so theres that
Hell yeah, support those local businesses people.
@@matrixfull I calibrate per month... and often every two months (doesn't vary that much, if at all)... but I do illustration (and in a lower percentage of gigs, design), not high end photography... Never crossed my mind going for such gig... calibrating other people's devices, lol. Hard to get enough clients for that, surely :D
I appreciate this video and is leading me to get these tools as I see the difference you made and I can now see my monitors are horrible as are the people I know so thank you and look forward to the advanced steps.
Digital Storm professionally calibrated my laptop display before shipping it to me and I guess they used X-Rite because there was a folder with iProfiler software in the start menu. I just avoid messing with it because I have no idea. I'm guessing it's just software used to load calibrated color profiles for the display.
best thing to do is not touch it.
if you ever want to reinstall windows backup the ICC profile so you can re use it later.
cool to get a pre calibrated display.
I've been told that, depending on where you live, it's possible to rent calibration tools from photography oriented shops. I guess they usually rent them to photographers who use Photoshop or Lightroom, but it's worth giving a shop like that a call. Even if the shop you call doesn't rent the tools they might be able to refer to someone who does.
A Calman tutorial would be awesome! Thanks for this!!
great! I just bought LG34gn850b and was researching how to calibrate my monitor! thanks HU
Awesome video. I’ve had a spider but never figured out how to use it
Thank you for this vid, ive been thinking about this topic but did not know how to approach it
Thanks Tim, been waiting for this one!
Just bought myself an i1Display Pro to play to keep me ticking over until I can actually buy a new CPU and GPU when they're properly in stock. I've been itching to calibrate my monitor for a few years now but wasn't able to justify spending that much on a calibrator when my previous monitor was a TN panel. Super excited to start generating ICC profiles/3D LUTs for Windows, MadVR, reshade for games and whatever else I can find.
Just over 200 usd, more like just under 300 🥴
I hate when they do that like linus said 500 dollar gaming pc it was 580...
Ice PlayZ YEAH LIKE WTF IT WAS SO ANNOYING
@@iceyberq I guess it depends if your the "glass half full" or "glass half empty" kinda person 😂
I understand the reason for it though. People look for common numbers, when searching for a product, i.e; $100, $500, $1000, etc. if they don't find anything there, then they tend to search for the middle of those numbers, such as, $250, $750, etc. So if they titled it "$600..." or even "Under $600...", then it may get overlooked.
It sucks, but just blame how algorithms work/feed info to consumers.
The "X-Rite i1Display Pro" actually costs 200USD, its just sold out on Amazon since the 3rd of July. The "X-Rite i1Display Pro Plus" costs 300USD
Prices change, and conversion rates too.
G'day Tim,
I'm not planning on Calibrating my 1080p@60Hz monitor, but I still found it really interesting to see how it is done & understand more of what you do during testing monitors for reviews
Dammit Tim. It's 1am Hawaii time. Guess I'll be late to work tomorrow haha. We've been waiting a long time for this video from you! I don't even own a PC, but I need to watch this! Keep up the awesome work guys!
I just signed up for your Patreon page and as I was logging in for the very first time I get a message saying my account was suspended for suspicious activity. WTF??!! I hadn't even been on it once. what a kick in the nuts..... Those folks over there at Patreon must be some mean SOB's. So sorry guys. I was really looking forward to being a part of your community.
Super helpful, thanks Tim!
At least I actually have access to CalMAN and SpectraCal equipment and have used it for a year now.
Yes, please do a tutorial using calMAN!
eagerly awaiting a more in-depth guide covering types of monitor backlights (WLED / PFS Phosphor WLED / RGB LED) and how those pair with getting calibrated with spectrometers vs colorimeters. fingers crossed.
Perfect timing, my monitor just came in today
for the price of that device i would buy a new 144hz monitor
Amesome, thank you so much for taking the time to teach us plebs how to do a basic calibration!
Holy jesus! IT'S FINALLY HERE
Bought mine used for 50, $60 total with shipping. Saved myself quite a bit of money😆
i really wished you chose spyder x for demonstrating the process as the one you used instead is half the price as the monitor i am planning buy.
I don't think my monitor needs calibration.
Cool green hoodie btw!
So much respect for this one...
You Sir deserve a cookie!!
Wow, very nice guide!, thank you very much!!! (runing some monitors for years with no calibration lol)
The "As Measured" white level on my Dell XPS13 looked weird. I changed it to D65 and it looked much more natural.
This seemed like something I’d be interested in until y’all revealed that the necessary hardware is 1/2 to 2/3 the cost of my monitor..
How can we use this for a TV for instance where a computer won't be plugged in after calibration to load that profile?
there's lots of guides on the geeky side of film forums.
simply in part your changing the display's settings to match close to correct during the proses.
i have mixed feelings about the value for a Tv, relay depends on what Tv you have. a lost of tv's will have a cinema or netflix mode which is fairly good.
look at a YT channel called 'hdtvtest' if your relay interested.
instrument not showing up showing driver file cant be found when I click on tools and instrument to update driver.
For those of you having trouble getting your device working with DisplayCAL...
Start.
Hold Shift Key.
Restart ( continue holding shift key ).
Start Up Options.
Restart system without driver signature enforcement.
Open Display Cal.
Then do everything he says in the Video. You should be good after that.
This is one great guide, many many thanks!!
I really wish all monitors had a standard USB "debug" port, and a protocol so that calibration tools could hook into those and flash profiles to the monitor directly. that seems like it'd be a useful thing.
display's with LUT tend to cost a lot more.
I love this channel since it gives all the information you need very clearly. I was looking for reviews on monitor and videos from this channel is the most helpful and easy to understand. They still need to should put the product's name on screen though.
Thank you for the information.
OMG been waiting for this... Thank you so much Tim
Okay now I need another explanation video to understand everything you said in this one
If you'd prefer a Spectrophotometer for monitor and other calibration work, you can get one for about $500, by searching on Ebay for "es-2000". It's a private label rebrand of the I1 Pro2, but since few people outside of the printing industry know that name, you can get it for half the price.
The downside is you don't get a monitor calibration software included, (i1 profiler is good, but finicky) but you could buy one, or use one of the several free profiling software packages for your monitor.
I have an EFI es-1000 I bought on ebay to correct my colorimeter. ColorHCFR is a good free calibration software if you need one for advanced calibrations.