Laptop + second monitor + Vista = calibration confusion

[Damo77]

Hi all,

I've answered plenty of questions about calibration in the past, but now I have to ask one.

Visited a friend today with my EyeOne Display 2 to calibrate his laptop (Toshiba Satellite yada yada). No worries there.

But he's also got a nice big Samsung that he wants to plug in and use as an external monitor. Ok ... getting into unknown territory here ... I opened the EyeOne Match software again, moved it onto the Samsung, and calibrated. No worries.

Now, Vista seems to recognise what's going on. Before calibration, the same desktop photo on both monitors was different; after calibration - both pretty much identical. Happy so far.

But Photoshop CS3 doesn't get it. Open a photo and duplicate it, then compare it on each screen ... vastly different. Looks good on the laptop screen, yuck on the Samsung.

So, my question is: can we make this work? Can we make Photoshop utilise the two different monitor profiles?

Heck, don't worry about that, here's a simpler idea. How can we make Photoshop recognise the Samsung as the main editing monitor whenever it's hooked up, and use the Samsung profile? After all, my friend doesn't need to edit on both monitors - just the nice big one would do.

Macs seem to do this much better than PCs.

* Oh, it hurt me so much to say that!!! *

Thanks for any help you can give me.

[René Damkot]

Not sure about that laptop, or Vista for that matter, but I recently calibrated a friends MacBook Pro with an external display, and the calibration was only valid for the last display calibrated: The video card doesn't appear to have a seperate LUT for the external display, so you can't calibrate both.

If you calibrate just the external display, it should work I think.
On my G5, running a dual display setup with PS or LR is no problem.

[Moppie]

The Eye one display 2 software is not capable of calibrating mulitple monitors under windows.

They claim it is because windows does not support it, but Colour vision don't have any problems doing it with he Spyder Pro.

[Damo77]

Thanks Moppie, but now I'm not sure what to think. As I said, it appeared that the calibration worked just fine, and that Vista recognised and honoured the two profiles. But Photoshop didn't.

Anyway, two calibrated monitors is one more than we need. What I really want to know is how to make Photoshop use the external monitor as the profiled one.

René, the external monitor was the last one calibrated, but it didn't seem to make a difference.

[René Damkot]

Hmmm. Weird.
In that case it might be a Vista / spyder issue; I used a Monaco Optix XR Pro on OSX.

[Damo77]

Ha ha! Don't use the "S" word around me! I use an EyeOne ...

[René Damkot]

Oops :o

[songexe]

I'd be interested in knowing the solution to this as well. Windows doesn't want to play nice with my calibration...

[Default501x]

if you have a newer Nvidia GPU, you might check the control panel, there should be some controls in there to help you out.

[Colorblinded]

I've been dealing with this as I just upgraded to a Spyder 3 Pro. My secondary monitor is looking nothing like my primary monitor but I did not spend much time with it to see if a different setting would be better. I also haven't checked how it looks in photoshop on both monitors, I just know other applications and my desktop aren't looking right. I'm running Vista as well, so I will be interested to see if this is a Spyder + Vista problem. I've found a setting on my monitor that basically fudges it and happens to make my right monitor look reasonably close to the left but I'd rather solve the calibration issue.

[ChasP505]

if you have a newer Nvidia GPU, you might check the control panel, there should be some controls in there to help you out.

Yeah, I barely remember reading something recently in reference to nVidia cards and calibrating dual monitors. I know it talked about requiring a PCIE type newer nVidia card with "dual heads", but I don't remember any more details.

[Colorblinded]

I've seen mention of that but it is all very vague. I've got a GTX 260 and so far it seems like I am able to create and apply two profiles, but my secondary monitor still isn't coming out quite right.

[René Damkot]

Yeah, I barely remember reading something recently in reference to nVidia cards and calibrating dual monitors. I know it talked about requiring a PCIE type newer nVidia card with "dual heads", but I don't remember any more details.

There is this article, but that's about XP: Link (http://www.northlight-images.co.uk/article_pages/dual_monitor_calibration.html)