Re: color profiles for screens/monitors

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On Sun, 2024-11-17 at 12:09 +0100, lejeczek via users wrote:
> Now I have two "identical" Dell monitors - P2418D - and colors are
> different, one has whites cooler whereas the second's whites (thus
> other colors) are warmer.

That was the bane of anyone involved in video production since colour
TV came out.  Every monitor looked different thanks to manufacturing
tolerances, and how they were individually set up.  It led to many
studio control rooms only using monochrome monitors for all camera
preview screens, to stop it being a major distraction.  Only preview
and program were colour, being almost unavoidably needing to be colour,
with the technical director having a very expensive precision colour
monitor.

And the same with video-assist in film productions, using monochrome
monitors, to stop the art director continually complaining that
something in shot wasn't the colour that they wanted (it was impossible
to convince them it was an impossible goal, since everybody watching it
on their home TV would see it differently, too, no matter what you
tried).

With modern sets, default factory calibration became a lot better.  You
can still pick differences but it's no-longer so glaringly obvious. 
And it's quite common to see a wall of monitors that are very close to
each other in rendition (so long as they're similar models and ages).

To custom align two (or more) monitors, you'll need calibration
equipment (if you need that precision), or you'll have to eyeball
things, while feeding them with a common signal source.

e.g. HDMI out from one source, into a splitter, fed to both monitors.

If you feed two video monitors from two different sources, whatever is
generating their signals may create it differently from each other.

If eyeballing, you need to be in an environment with neutral colours
around the monitors.  Coloured walls nearby will fool your eyes. 
You'll fall for the same trick butchers employ - green around the meat
trays make the meat look redder, because our colour perception is all
relative (one thing against another).

The standard approach is to view a monochrome test pattern.  Adjust
each monitor to the same brightness, contrast, and gamma (that's the
linearity between black and white, how the greys track between signal
generation and picture display).  Brightness, or black level, should
set up black image areas to be barely illuminated.  Contrast should set
the maximum white level to be suitable for the viewing conditions.

Then, adjust the tint the monitor gives to a monochrome picture, so
that there's no apparent tint (it's not blueish, warmish-orange, etc). 
This has to be done in conjunction with the room lighting, because the
monitor will appear different, perhaps very different, depending on
ambient light.  If you take the monitor elsewhere, or change your room
lighting (e.g. day versus night), your monitor will look different. 
You vision is always comparing one thing against the other.

On some monitors, you only have crude tint controls.  Overall cold-
blue, warm, and so-called neutral somewhere in the middle.  Others give
you individual red, green, and blue gain controls.

Then you try a colour image.  In the days of broadcast television there
were colour controls to adjust (the amount of colour, or saturation),
tint controls for the colour decoder in countries with poor composite
colour video systems (i.e. NTSC).  But since we no-longer use encoded
colour (PAL/NTSC/SECAM), there's next to no actual colour adjustments
available.  The monochrome setup (above) has configured how the display
illuminates, and that includes colour reproduction.

If you try and tweak displays looking at colour pictures, you'll misset
the the greyscale tracking of monochrome images.  And that how most
colour signals are done (whether analogue or digital):  The base signal
is monochrome, the colour signals are the differences from monochrome. 
Very few things are simply RGB (red, green, and blue primary colours
from image acquisition, generation, manipulation, and display).  Most
become a colour-difference signal somewhere in the middle of that
process.

HDR (high dynamic range) throws a new spanner in the works.  It may use
a different gamma than standard (it's supposed to, according to some
industry opinions).  It will probably illuminate the screen even
brighter with stronger input signal data than standard (non HDR).  In
some countries the black signal level has changed, and that should
still produce the same level of non-illumination on the screen. 
Really, a monitor needs separate calibration and configuration controls
for non-HDR and HDR since they're very different signals.  If you use
the screen to view HDR and non-HDR, it can be a juggling act of how to
set up the screen.  You may find non-HDR seems murky and HDR harsh and
glary.

You may find it easier to tweak one monitor to match another if it's
one above the other, rather than one beside the other.  For some
people, that's just easier.  And either way, with LCD based screens the
viewing angle changes how it looks.  You'd have to aim each screen at
you, rather then have them flat relative to each other.  While they're
better, these days, at having wider viewing angles, calibrating them is
more finicky than just watching them.
 
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