Monitor Profile

[jovos]

My monitor is calibrated and the profile loads with Windows startup. Since the profile is already loaded do I need to select that profile in Color Management or should I select none?

Tried to seach for "monitor profile" in the forum but the message says the words are too common and will be ignored.

Thanks

John

[Dieter Mayr]

John,

It's not the profile that is loaded at Startup, it's the LookUpTable (LUT) which tells the graphic card which color ist to be displayed with which settings. The LUT is created during the calibration process.
PWP does not read the settings in Windows which profile is associated with the monitor, so you have to select your profile in the Monitor section of Color Management settings.

[jovos]

Dietr

Thanks for your quick reply. Please excuse my ignorance here. I calibrate my monitor with Colorvision's Spyder 2.2. There is a Colorvision program, Profile Chooser, which runs at startup which appears to load my monitor profile, at least the picture on my Windows desktop changes as the program runs. Now here's my confusion. First, I disabled Profile Chooser then set PWP 6 Monitor Profile to None and restarted the computer. Then I opened a picture in PWP and manually ran Profile Chooser. The picture instantly changed as if the profile had been applied. If PWP ignores monitor profiles unless set in Color Management what is actually happening here?

Thanks again

John

[jsachs]

Profile Chooser loads color lookup tables (LUTs) that are stored within the monitor profile but which - strictly speaking - are not the profile itself. The purpose of the LUTs is to cause the monitor to conform to a specific standard - a particular white point, red, green, and blue primaries, and a gamma curve. The LUTs are computed based on measurements of the screen by a colorimiter during the monitor calibration process. The calibration software usually allows for options such as selecting the white point and gamma manually. Selecting the monitor profile generated by the calibration software in PWP's Color Management settings lets PWP know the standard to which the monitor is calibrated so it can convert images for display from the working color space or other color spaces. Both actions - loading LUTs and specifying the monitor profile in PWP - are necessary to make color management work correctly. Some of the confusion comes from the fact that the LUTs are embedded in the profile so the phrase "loading a profile" is loosely used to describe either loading the LUTs within the profile or loading the other profile data, however doing both does not lead to double correction as you may be thinking.

[Dieter Mayr]

John,

As Jonathan mentioned out in detail, you need both, the Clut loader (Profile Chooser) and the profile setting in PWP.
You may want to have a look at the white paper "Color Management" which gives some good introducion to this theme.
http://dl-c.com/content/view/34/55/

[jovos]

Jonathan hit the nail on the head with "doing both does not lead to double correction as you may be thinking." Thank you both. Will post a separate question about another "double correction" concern.

John