calibration question

i finally got around to making a profile for my laptop, win xp 32bit. used eyeone. i could swear that the whole thing is a lot less blue than it used to be. grays are a lot warmer. did windows become color aware? i was under the impression that even though you had a monitor profile loaded as the default monitor profile in the windows display properties, it didn't affect every application including the OS. i thought that's where color aware apps looked for a profile?

thanks

I was really hoping some wise person would come along and answer this, because I want to know too ...

I think that Windows is aware that there's a colour profile there, and uses it in a "dumb" way to display its colours accordingly (eg warmer in your case). However, this isn't the same as being colour-managed. Colour management involves the recognition and utilisation of ICC profiles.

Example: if you have a photo in Adobe RGB colour space, and display it in Windows (eg as a desktop picture), it won't show it correctly.

I'm guessing a fair bit here ...

Time to dig out 'the explanation' again This is a copy and paste of something I posted before, so bear with me if it sounds a bit long winded...

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What you're seeing is the difference between 'calibration' of the monitor, and the monitor profile. There are 2 parts to 'profiling' a monitor.

1 - The monitor is calibrated. This sets up things like the approximate white point and gamma of the screen, and is done by a combination of adjusting the monitor by hand and loading a LookUp Table (LUT) to the graphics card. This gets the monitor into a reasonable and, more importantly, known state for profiling.

2 - The monitor is profiled. This involves measuring the actual response of the calibrated monitor (RGB chromaticities, measured white point etc.). This info is stored in the ICC profile ('.icc' or '.icm' file), and is used by Photoshop, DPP (and some other apps, but not all) to correct the RGB values sent to the monitor.

When Windows starts your software will load the appropriate calibration LUT to the graphics card that works with the ICC profile selected. This will change the appearance of the screen in all applications - it's the reason you can see the screen appearance change while Windows is starting.

For accurate colour, however, an application still needs to use the profile to adjust the colours correctly. With things like DPP, that means you must select the monitor profile in order to be colour managed. Some applications (e.g. Photoshop, Elements) will automatically use the profile without being told to. Most applications (e.g. Firefox) will ignore the profile completely, and will therefore not display colour accurately.

(Just to confuse the issue, the ICC profile specification allows people to store additional information in the '.icm/icc' file. While it is not strictly part of the profile itself, most vendors use this facility to store the LUT data in the '.icm/icc' file. This is sensible, since it means you can't lose the calibration data - the profile is only valid after the LUT is applied).

gcogger wrote in post #4930729
Time to dig out 'the explanation' again
***************
What you're seeing is the difference between 'calibration' of the monitor, and the monitor profile. There are 2 parts to 'profiling' a monitor.


When Windows starts your software will load the appropriate calibration LUT to the graphics card that works with the ICC profile selected. This will change the appearance of the screen in all applications - it's the reason you can see the screen appearance change while Windows is starting..

well there you have it. this afternoon i rebooted the laptop and just as the desktop showed up, i saw the switch. went from the real cool color desktop background to the more neutral. i never would have believed it without seeing that. i have read extensively, but apparently never picked up on this!

on my desktop machine, i used the manual settings of color temp within my sony monitor. that partly explains why i never saw much of a difference before vs after. i always used the 6500k preset so manually tweaking it using the puck never changed it that much. although, it is a little on the warm side.

thanks