Color calibration issue

I was originally going to post this asking for some help in tracking down a color calibration issue I have been having for the last couple of weeks but I believe I have discovered the underlying issue this morning, so I guess this is more of me letting others know what the issue is so they can be on the lookout for it.

I have a wide gamut Dell U2713H and just recently built a new computer. My previously processed images on the new computer look washed out, less contrasty and less "punchy" so until I figured out the underlying issue I have been running both systems side-by-side connected to two different inputs on the monitor.

Both systems are color calibrated using the i1Display Pro using the monitors internal LUT with each monitor calibrated to its own individual profile (with the same settings) so I can bounce back and forth between the two systems and maintain a calibrated workflow on each system. The graphics card settings are "flat", no adjustments have been made with the graphics card software on either system. I am using a color managed browser (Firefox with the gfx.color_management.m​ode set to 1) and viewing images with the color profile embedded.

I noticed that an image that I processed on my new computer looked super contrasty and over saturated when viewed on my old computer. Also, as I mentioned above, images that I had processed on the old computer looked washed out and less saturated on my new computer.

I spent a couple of days troubleshooting, making sure that all monitor controls were the same when viewing on each system, all images were tagged sRGB, etc. This morning I noticed that on the old system the monitor driver was showing as "generic PNP" instead of the Dell U2713H driver. Normally when I setup a new computer I install all software and drivers and then create an image so that when I want to reinstall the OS I can just restore that image and save myself the time of having to reinstall everything. I have flattened and restored that image at least 3 times on my old computer since I originally built it in 2013. I am assuming that when I first imaged my OS drive I didn't have the monitor driver installed. So I installed the driver on the old computer and rebooted and sure enough, the images on my old computer now look just as washed out and less saturated as on my new computer.

So I now have color parity on the two computers (and now the image I processed on the new computer looks exactly the same on the old computer). Of course, the issue is that if I truly am color calibrated, a bunch of my photos that I had processed over the years actually look like crap

Interesting however. I am confused as I understand it you colour calibrated both systems ?

So I would expect the calibration software to create a different profile on each machine that gives almost identical images on each irrespective of the graphics/monitor driver being used unless the drivers were changed after the calibration ? Isn't this the reason for using colour calibrators ?

It sounds like what the OP is saying is that, somewhere along the line, the "old" machine's display profile got swapped for a generic one (maybe during a restore or driver update) so that the "old" machine was, unbeknownst to the OP, no longer operating under the calibration and profiling that was made with the i1Display Pro. This was only detected after calibration and profiling of the new machine and comparing the results. Now that both machines are calibrated and profiled, the results look the same.

kirk

So, the issue wasn't that the actual calibration profile on the "old" system was swapped for a generic one. The calibration profile remained in the internal LUT of the monitor for the old system, but simply using a generic PNP driver for the Dell monitor instead of the actual Dell driver cased the profile to not be accurate. I believe that what happened is that at some time after I had calibrated the old system, I reinstalled a backup of the OS that didn't include the Dell driver and that threw the profile off.

Bcaps wrote in post #18973540
So, the issue wasn't that the actual calibration profile on the "old" system was swapped for a generic one. The calibration profile remained in the internal LUT of the monitor for the old system, but simply using a generic PNP driver for the Dell monitor instead of the actual Dell driver cased the profile to not be accurate. I believe that what happened is that at some time after I had calibrated the old system, I reinstalled a backup of the OS that didn't include the Dell driver and that threw the profile off.

Gotcha!

thanks for clarifying - my bad.

kirk