Monitor calibration ever drive you nuts? a rant...

Without a doubt it's an adventure trying to find my way in the world of digital photography. It's all good when put into perspective, but some of the struggles that come along can be a real nag. With post processing becoming more important to me also comes the question of whether the final product looks the same to the rest of the world. I got a monitor that is supposed to be good, then realized it needs to be calibrated. So i go buy a calibrator and use it and then so many of my images look cooked, white balance off, etc., Then recalibrate and get different results, do some reading, calibrate again,,,, different results,,,, To the point i really have no idea what the images look like to the rest of the world.
Eventually i decided to turn off all the lights in the house at night and recalibrate,,,, ok, not too bad, pretty close to the prints i had made (for the first time),,, so around the same time i was suggested to try dispcal GUI / argyllis,,,,,, so i figure why not and tried that. They looked pretty much the same as the very last calibration i did. Whooo hooo! Now a couple weeks have went by since then,,,,,my mind is wondering again, looking at my flickr images some are a little dark, some a little cooked (to my eyes, lol), and i start thinking there is some warm color cast on the current calibration. Ok, i'll double check the calibration today and see what it comes up with,,,,,dispcal has an error and won't run my calibrator. I was lucky to even figure out how to install the program let alone know what's up with the error so here we go.
Really not so much a question as much as a rant along the road to finding my way in digital photography. But,,,if someone sees my recent images and thinks they are out of whack in some way and have a well calibrated monitor i'm a sucker for punishment so let me know. LOL!!!
I don't hear groans on the subject very much so maybe this is overreaction and my ocd will move on to something else.

Once you calibrate your monitor... anything you produced pre-calibration is going to look like crap... You need to go back, and re-post-process your images to the new calibration...

cbay said:

Without a doubt it's an adventure trying to find my way in the world of digital photography...

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Your post makes me wonder what you're using to calibrate your monitor... I use a Spyder 5 from DataColor to calibrate my monitor and while I have needed to adjust the settings on occasion all that was required were very minor tweaks. Those take maaaaaybe five minutes to accomplish and I'm right back to rockin' and rollin' some Ps. Maybe it's time you got out of this toxic relationship?

All that being said, Fred makes a good point... How wacky your pre-calibration shots looks is just an indicator of why you need to calibrate your monitor.

Horoscope Fish said:

Maybe it's time you got out of this toxic relationship?

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I wouldn't say the colormunki is really toxic, it's more than likely my getting to understand how to use it.

cbay said:

I wouldn't say the colormunki is really toxic, it's more than likely my getting to understand how to use it.

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I hope so, Chris, for YOUR sake... Remember if you need a safe place I'm... uh... well... I'm sure there's one near you... Somewhere.






....
/"Please Colormunki... Not in the face!"

The other side is if you are so used to looking at an uncalibrated monitor, The calibration looks a bit weird for a little while (Well, For me atleast)
I have messed up the calibration once by messing around with my monitor configuration, But other then that it has all been good.

Also, Don't forget to calibrate every month or so. (The DATACOLOR Software defaults to 2 weeks for a reminder, But I've set it to once a month).

I know my calibrator software tells me to turn off all lights in my part of town and do it on a moonless night. Any extraneous light hitting the screen will throw off the calibration.

I have dual matched monitors and trying to get both of them to perfectly match is a pain but the end results is nice though.

Don Kuykendall said:

I know my calibrator software tells me to turn off all lights in my part of town and do it on a moonless night. Any extraneous light hitting the screen will throw off the calibration.

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Doing that recently got me closer than i had before. Previously i had just trusted that the ambient meter function would take care of all the different light sources i had going. Also dispcal allowed me to adjust whitepoint better and get what i believe is pretty good. Also,,, finally figured out why dispcal wasn't working.. Colormunki software had to be disabled for it to work. Will run it again tonight and hopefully find it close to the same - which will go a long ways towards having confidence in what i'm seeing.

I calibrate in the dark with no other light source in the room. I also use the same print source every time I do a print. Reason is that you never match EXACTLY to a print, but I do know from using the same outlet that their will be the slightest touch of warming in the print when compared to my screen. I can compensate for that because, again, I always use the same printing outlet.

Just like the Fish, I use a Spyder to calibrate.

I use an IMac and am happy to say that my screen resolution and color are dead on. They were dead on the day I bought it and it is still dead on 3and 1/2 years later. And my prints coming out of my Canon 9500 Pro exactly match what I am seeing on my monitor. So I am not screwing around with it.
I am annoyed to learn that the new 5k IMac uses a different color space than my present one. It is said to be a color space more suitable for video than still photography. If that is so, I will not be buying one.

Yup ive never colour corrected any of my monitors and my prints look dead on