HOW THE F*** DOES SCREEN CALIBRATION WORK? - Tutorial

EXPAND FOR NAVIGATION:
1:48 Laying a solid foundation for understanding logical/physical pixel color differences
10:47 Explaining how guide layers work (in After Effects)
13:09 The color picker does NOT ignore guide layers

14:02 Monitor color profiles can be thought of as a type of guide layer!

14:59 And now to introduce an orange .ICM file:

15:46 THIS IS WHERE ALL OF YOUR .ICM FILES ARE LOCATED:
C:\Windows\System32\spool\drivers\color

16:23 IF YOU DON'T WANT TO DEAL WITH MONITOR COLOR MANAGEMENT AT ALL:
Go to (Windows key) → "Color Management" and see if you have a color profile installed. If you do, but you didn't put it there, you should add "sRGB IEC61966-2.1" and make that one the default instead. (Or better yet, use a profile that says "Uncalibrated")

16:52 How to set a specific color profile as your default, in Windows

Notice how the colors in Photoshop will now change as soon as you click into it.

21:08 KEY LESSON: Do not take screenshots or screencapture of applications that are color managed!

HOW TO ENABLE COLOR MANAGEMENT in various applications:

18:52 Photoshop (It happens automatically)
23:11 After Effects
QUESTION 1: In After Effects, why does choosing "sRGB IEC61966-2.1" use my default color profile (in this case, 3008WFP_DVI) instead?
24:26 Premiere

26:07 QUESTION 2: I have no idea why the color management results in Premiere are quite different from PS and AE. Any ideas??

QUESTION 3: (Not shown) How do you enable color management in Davinci Resolve??

26:30 Explaining why color management is important -- most monitor are oversaturated!

29:00 Getting ready to calibrate the monitor (With CalMAN)
Your monitor's menu settings are SEPARATE from what the calibration is going to do! It is only part 1/3 of the calibration!
Also, make sure you are using an uncalibrated color profile before you start calibrating!!

32:55 And now to calibrate the monitor! (It does not go well)

34:06 Sorry, I couldn't figure out how to use the calibration software (CalMAN client.) If you need help with that, you'll have to find some other tutorial...
QUESTION 4: Do you know of a good video tutorial for CalMAN client calibration?

34:23 Calibration produces and applies a 1D LUT to the screen that only changes the physical pixels. Super important! This is part 2/3 of the calibration. The .ICM file (which alters the logical values) is part 3/3

37:20 So, now we have a proper monitor color profile, which you should get working in all your applications, as I've already shown at 24:00 and 25:21

37:36 THE SCREEN RECORDING PARADOX
You have to turn off calibration before you create a Photoshop/Premiere/After Effects/etc tutorial. This way, the audience's colors will be accurate, even though yours will not.

39:36 HOW TO DISABLE COLOR MANAGEMENT in various applications:

In Chrome:
In the address bar, go to chrome://flags/#force-color-profile and set it to "sRGB"
Further reading:

In Firefox:
Type "about:config" into the address bar and press ENTER.
search for:
And set it to "2." (Or 0 might work as well, IDK.)
Further reading:

41:12 QUESTION 5: How exactly do reference monitors work?

41:54 Multi-monitor stuff, idk.

45:41 Premiere's color picker has issues.

46:20 QUESTION 6: My concerns about 24-bit color space not being granular enough

47:56 QUESTION 7: How to fix other troublesome Photoshop color problems

49:46 How color profiles work ON IMAGES (maybe)
QUESTION 7: Am I right? If not, plz explain.

53:44 Your GPU might be showing you partial or "limited" colors (resulting in posterization.)
You can change that in the Nvidia Control Panel under "Adjust video color settings" → Advanced → Full (0-255)
QUESTION 9: What exactly does that setting do??

EXTRA - QUESTION 10:
16:30 What's the difference between monitor calibration and monitor profiling?

[nootnoot]

I'm watching this on my phone with the blue light filter on and you can't stop me

[chaquator]

youre like a monk at LMG spending years and years studying tedious things to make detailed rant videos

[supremeoverlordetna]

I don't even own any color calibration tools but here I am watching this at 3 in the morning.

[GENIRYODAN]

30 seconds for the short answer and 1 hour for the full answer. That's some serious compression.

[AlphaCore_]

The part I love is the title will be exactly what people will type on search when they're frustrated, lol.
"HOW TF DOES THIS WORK"

[MrRedinator_]

Alt. title: "taran getting slightly mad for almost an hour straight"

[AlexLog]

Poor Taran.. he’s one lab accident away from becoming a super villain. We love him though, as we loved Thanos. Go Taranos! 🔥

[VitusSoska]

And to answer the question how to get accurate colors: you need video-out card like the blackmagic mini monitor or similar to output the video signal without the OS, Drivers and Profiles intefering the image outputed to the monitor. just plain hardware or 3D-Lut calibrated monitors will get you to accurate colors down the whole video pipeline.

Accordingly to you question what a reference monitor is : it's a monitor which has the highest possible accuracy in the color space you're working in (for web it's sRGB, for video: REC709, for cinema it's DCI-P3, for print it's Adobe or Profoto RGB, for HDR Rec2020). And this Display should bypass all Inteference of the OS by sending the signal through a dedicated video-card output (NOT graphics-card).

Question 9: May check for Video and Data Levels for further explanation ( but as I already saw, you got a response on this for question 5 :) )
Question 10: Calibration is usualy refered to the adjustment of the monitor settings by a 3D-Lut or dedicated controls on the monitor to adjust brightness, contrast, blackpoint, whitepoint, rgb, etc.
Profiling is the creation of a, in your case ICC Profile for calibrating you monitor softwarewise.

[MirdjanHyle]

In today's episode, Taran will fight with the concept of justified true belief and epistemological responsibility.

[todayonthebench]

This video nicely outlines the big issues with color calibration.
But in short:

Color calibration in general is fairly poorly implemented. Since most implementations lets the application of these color corrections wander about and muck outside the field where it is actually needed. Since what do we want to calibrate when we talk about color calibrating a monitor?


What we want to calibrate isn't the color-space in software, since the logical pixel values are perfect already. And changing logical pixel values with "calibration" can lead to recursive "over calibration", so one will move from calibrated, to less calibrated, to even less calibrated, etc.
If we want to display a certain sRGB/Adobe-RGB/SWOP-CMYK/etc color, then it has a defined value that it should have when viewed on a PERFECT screen. (some of these color standards are relative, and not absolute. But that is a topic for another day)


We only want to calibrate the display's representation of those logical values. Since we want to correct the non-linearity and absolute values (if applicable) of the physical pixels on the monitor, as to ensure that it displays the correct colors in accordance to our color-space. Ie, our display is far from perfect.


We shouldn't calibrate out our manufacturing tolerances and imperfections of our monitor by denting our color space on the logical pixel level. What we should do is add correction values to the logical pixel values giving us our physical pixel values that we send off to the display, while leaving our logical pixel values unaltered. Screenshots should also just use the untouched logical pixel values. Since with a screenshot we aren't interested in showing how much calibration your monitor needed, but rather take a picture of what is currently on screen.


The only thing color calibration should do is apply the needed correction to the physical pixel values to ensure that the display shows the correct color in accordance to the color-space. Also, there is at no point any need for any software to ever use physical pixel values. (there might be edge cases that can be exempt from this rule. Like checking manufacturing tolerances of monitors, to check in on production quality etc. (not that it would be done in such a fashion regardless))


Translating color-spaces between each other is though a thing that makes color calibration harder, but very indirectly. But as long as one goes from a smaller color-space to a larger one, this isn't a major issue. (Also, going from relative color-spaces to absolute ones and vice versa is though complicating these matters.) But translating color spaces has almost nothing to do with color calibration, unless your OS/system color-space (what is used to send the color data to the monitor) is relative. (then you need to add an absolute calibration to the relative color-space, so that one can send absolute color-spaces through the relative one and still display them correctly.)


Now I do need to add, if this above seems logical, then you too will hate how current color calibration implementations are made, since they rarely if ever even follow anything of what is mentioned above.

Since some color calibration is happening on the logical pixel level, even if it shouldn't. Some applications works pre calibration, other post, some jumps back and forth. And other's outright doesn't support it.... In the end, color calibrating monitors, and translating color-spaces between each other and display it correctly on a monitor is something that frankly has been implemented extremely poorly in practice. And we are all to suffer from it.

[djdjukic]

Let me give you a way back to sanity:
1a. If you have the money, buy the reference monitor
or
1b. If you don't, buy a reasonably good monitor that has good colors from the factory and twiddle the knobs in the OSD if it looks a bit off
2. Force-set everything to sRGB (Windows sometimes applies an insane color profile to certain monitors. Don't know why.)
3. Give the calibrator to someone who does print. They need it.
4. Forget about software calibration.

[Deses]

Plot twist: Taran has been colorblind all this time.

[mroctavio]

We don't deserve you Taran.
YOU KEEP GIVING ME TUTORIALS ON THINGS I GAVE UP LONG AGO, I love you man. Thank you

[Bunjamin]

Your videos, sense of humor, and ability to convey info-dense material always makes me smile and learn. Thanks, TVH! Also, please host something.. cuz goddam, your sense of humor is great - new Rad bike reviews? Somethin!

[blaowy]

sorry to disappoint but there’s a lot more to this and it gets even more confusing. especially when you try to work with more than sRGB - wide color gammut for example.. my advice is to leave your monitors uncalibrated and don’t mess with color profiles in software - just try to calibrate them in hardware (monitor settings). Then your life will get easier and you’ll have to resolve only the color profile stuff of images, videos etc. - and that’s a whole another topic....

[StRM]

There is no *perfect calibration*. You calibrate for a specific Illuminant; usually D65 which corresponds to the specific distribution of humanly visible black body radiation, aka roughly to the average midday light in Western Europe (comprising both direct sunlight and the light diffused by a clear sky).



This means if you get an object and measure its colour under those light conditions using a 100% accurate spectrocolorimeter and convert that to an RGB value an display it at a 100% calibrated and capable monitor, you should be able to see the exact same colour as if you were to see it in real life.



This is because what we see as colour is essentially "fake". If you see an object at dusk will have different colour than in the morning. If we shine a street lamp on it will have a different colour again. There is no colour, it is our mind's construct (and if we get into how light cones in our eyes work and what we preserve as colour it gets even more complicated).


Due to technical limitations and other shenanigans we decided to use SRGB as a restricted limit/range of what we should be able to achieve and "agreed" that we all go by that standard. HDR supposes to let us free of that limit and dynamically adjust the effective illuminant so we can get a more realistic image.

Tech has still not advanced enough to be able to make us preserve reality, and might well never be able to unless we plug our optic nerves and send signals directly, effectively bypassing the sensor which is our retina.


What calibration is good for is so that you can match as closely as possible to a reference which should be in your case the most popular display devices used to watch your content. This way everyone and all their monitors work as closely to each other so everyone sees the same result.



It's a essentially the same thing that what we do with audio reference monitors, but for displays and it is more complicated because at least in audio we all pretty much hear music in air of approx the same composition, density, temp, pressure. With photo/video we have this pesky sun changing shit all day and night so we need to deal with it differently.


In the end, calibration is relative unless you are doing scientific work, and you should only think of what you are personally trying to achieve with it.


ps. i'm not expert in this science but trust me, i'm an engineer

[riveteye]

God bless you taran, as a digital artist I've almost given up on proper color manager, instead just refusing to look at my work on anything but the screen I made it on.

[frostpixel]

Watching this on my potato TN panel with like 10% color accuracy

[Veriflon]

10 minutes in and I already feel like I have learned more than I should have

[tohothewriter]

This video has single-handedly given me a new appreciation and somewhat better understanding of monitor reviews and why an accurate color gamut matters in the first place. The first 30 minutes(before the displaycal rant) is essential to actually make sense of what is going on behind the scene during a screen calibration. I don't use any, but that doesn't mean I can't learn about it in the off chance someone I know needs help.


Fun story, my best friend recently calibrated her laptop monitor and now she has a pink mouse cursor with the calibration on, and normal colored when uncalibrated. The weird thing about it though is that when we screen shared her desktop, the cursor was showing as white in the "preview" window while still a "calibrated" pink on her monitor. So I tried helping her out with fixing the issue as best I could using this video as reference/guideline until we came to the conclusion that the calibration is likely inaccurate because of the keyboard's red light reflecting on the screen while calibrating it, and that she should watch the video herself to make sense of it for herself instead.


I get the general concepts that are explained, I just suck at passing them on to someone else because I don't have the actual knowledge to explain it and make sense at the same time. "Obviously" really isn't applicable in any sense of the word. It isn't obvious in the least, and anyone saying that "color calibration is obvious" doesn't know how technicality heavy it really is or understands anything about the process.