New Monitor...Not The Same Colors

I bought my mother a new monitor for Christmas and just set it up and got everything installed...it's a Samsung Syncmaster 931B...my old monitor was a standard Dell. Anyway, I've noticed that with the new monitor the colors are no longer the same they aren't vibrant or vivid or "normal". They're all washed out and when I view my pictures I notice things that aren't there such as places I darkened in photoshop on my old monitor now appear lightened in the background and no longer darkened. Any suggestions on why things appear this way? I've tried fooling around with the configurations and installing the natural color program that comes along with it, but nothing has helped so any help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you in advance

Is yours calibrated?

No, I don't believe so. What does calibrated mean?

Items such as the Spyder, Colorvision, and the Pantone Huey are called "colorimiters". hardware calibration devices that tune your display to show accurate colors and tones. Basically, it shows you what things really look like, instead of showing you what you'd like to see. That way, should you want to print your pictures, they're not underexposed and oversaturated or something. They'll look just about like they do on your monitor.


Anyway, you said no, so it's not an issue. Different monitors are set differently. They all display things different until they're tuned to be alike.

Make sure that you have installed the proper drivers for that new monitor, it should have brought them along with it, if not log in to their website find them, download them and install them, that alone should make a big difference, specially if it is till running on the old Dell drivers. A lot of people rely on Windows XP installing the right drivers for things but I prefer to get my own from the vendors site. This way you are sure to get the most up-to-date ones available.

Does it cost money to have your monitor calibrated?

Well you have to buy the colorimeter. The Huey is the cheapest option, and it's the one I use, and you can get it at www.bhphotovideo.com for around $59. You won't believe the difference it makes.

Hmm. Well I installed the drivers from the official Samsung website but nothing happened?

Turn the brightness down (if that is an LCD).

http://epaperpress.com​/monitorcal/
http://www.jasc.com …t/kb/articles/m​onitor.asp

Here are a couple of sites that may help explain calibration.

Hardware calibration CHANGED MY LIFE!

Well, kinda. Before calibrating I had the hardest time getting colors to match what I saw on the screen. Calibrated and the before & after shots showed that my monitor *was* WAY Blue. And I didn't even realize. You look at your monitor and can never tell how off it really is. Now I can send prints to the printer or the lab and color isn't a worry anymore.

If you mess with color balance in Photoshop, you need to be calibrated. At a recent Eddie Tapp seminar, Eddie had those without a calibrated monitor to stand up and take an oath to not mess with the colors of their photos!

A good thing is that you really do not need to calibrate until every 3 or 6 months. If you have photographer friends, pitch in for the Huey that was mentioned. Its a one shot thing - but like I said, you want to re-calibrate every few months.

Also, make sure you run the monitor at it's native resolution. IE. If the monitor is rated at 1280*1024 you will get better color and image quality than if you run it at 800*600. I think it's beause at lower resolutions, the monitor tries to upscale the picture to the native resolution, and the circuitry in most of the monitors don't do a very good job.

--Evan