Question about professional color calibration on a monitor for Adobe Photoshop or Premiere editing..

Or is it even necessary? Back in the days of picture tube monitors I used to see hardware you can buy to do it yourself. Does something like this exist anymore? Is it necessary?

I watch videos of photographers and videographers on Youtube and they're using any old laptop or macbook and never talk about color calibration. Am I fretting for no reason?

Thanks for any help.

 

I think monitors and photo/video sensors are much more "accurate" now than they used to be, so semi-pro types may care less than before. But calibration would still be best for professional commercial uses. And separates the pros from not-pro.
Here's the least expensive model of the Spyder calibration line, $170, this would almost instantly prepare a color model calibration file for Windows or Mac.
https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1456247-REG/datacolor_sxp100_spyder_x_pro_colorimeter.html

 

I have worked off and on in 3D visualization and delivering renderings to clients with accurate color is an important aspect of that business. If a client's product has a specific color finish to it you can bet they want that color to look accurate. Unfortunately, while my monitor is calibrated my clients (who are art directors themselves) are often using crappy uncalibrated monitors, making the review process problematic. Often the renderings were destined for printed matter and our clients would just fudge the colors at the printing stage (which I was not a part of).

I create my own handmade art and while I try to have my scans look accurate on my computers, it can be shocking to see the color and value shifts when looking at the same image file on different displays.

I've used one other calibration system which I've forgotten the name of; these days I use the aforementioned Spyder system. I haven't calibrated in a while - I should do it.

 

Datacolor and X-Rite seem to be the major brands for calibration devices. I've got an X-Rite gizmo which I use for time to time. Decent monitors do seem pretty good out of the box these days though and I rarely see the values change far off the defaults.

 

Your monitor is used as a reference standard for showing real memory colors as they should look compared to an external photographed scene next to the monitor showing real items that contain memory colors like a yellow lemon against school bus yellow, sky blue next to royal blue, etc. including a standard color chart (Gretag MacBeth).

If you have a wide gamut monitor like an OLED it will need to be calibrated to show neutral black to mid gray to bright white scaling evenly with no banding in a smooth black and white gradient. (see below my sRGB color space calibrated and profiled 27in. LG)

You'll have to setup Photoshop to encode color in the OLED monitor wide gamut color space if you're not going to use color management (too complicated to outline here). Premiere will have settings to work in the monitor space as well but I've never edited video or used Premiere, just photos in Photoshop and it is color managed.

It's the color gamut space differences between photos in Photoshop vs video in Premiere in OLED color space that's going to be more of a problem than calibration which only puts the display in a known standard state as described above with neutral white and smooth black and white gradient and the example below. If you can make your monitor look as my sRGB gamut LG below, then our images should look the same on both displays shown side by side. I use Xrite Colormunki calibrator.

 

I'm thinking about buying one of these:

Why you need to calibrate your display / Featuring the Datacolor SpyderX - YouTube

 

Light Illusion has some good tech papers on why calibration is important:

Light Illusion: Why Calibrate?

Calman is also very good:

Calman color calibration software

We just hire a local engineer here in LA to calibrate our displays every 6 months so we know what we're seeing is real.

 

Based on your line of work, I hoping you'd chime in with your opinion on my OP at the top of the thread.

 

If you are planning to edit videos, then besides correct colors you need correct gamma and correct black/white levels. You can ensure correct black/white levels without calibrating your monitor, by simply checking the levels, if your tool have a waveform or histogram graph. You need to remember that for 8-bit video, black level starts from 16, not from 0, and white level is at 235, not 255. When you edit such a video on a computer, it may look washed out, because computers usually have 0 for black and 255 for white, and not all editing systems compensate for it. If you eye it by how it looks on your monitor, it may look over-contrast'y when you watch it on TV or even upload to YouTube, and some near-black and near-white details may be lost.

I am just saying, that calibrating will not solve all your problems if you get wrong things like black and white levels. The loss of detail is noticeable to many, while a slight change of color is noticeable to few. Unless, of course, the color should match other color.

Seeing videos on YouTube that garner millions of views, and which either have bad aspect ratio, or not deinterlaced correctly, have horrible colors, or bad contrast, or tons of other defects, I figured it is not worth it. Most viewers don't care about it. Enter any bar, they have TVs on the walls, which likely show SD image from their cable, squeezed or stretched, with black bars, and no one cares.

But yes, the hardware is available, and is cheap. I calibrated my old monitor and my plasma TV fifteen years ago. I have a Spyder3 and I used Calman and something else. Funny, I have not calibrated my current monitor.

 

I've never worked in any video editor like Adobe Premiere as the OP has stated he works in for video (I'm a still photographer) and I've heard about this chopping off the 8 bit dynamic range for absolute black and white for video editing so I thought that software like Premiere would do this automatically on the fly. I take it that it doesn't.

Another thing concerning video editors like Premiere is do they use ICC profiles created by calibration packages with a LUT/Gamma curve that resides on the computers graphics card for on the fly live conversion like it does in still images in Photoshop?

I notice these video editors just give a drop down menu selection of color spaces, LUTs and gamma curves but never mention ICC profiles as used in color managed editors like Photoshop.

 

I'm just tinkering... but I remember 20 years ago this seemed to be important and I hear very few people talk about it anymore.

 

If you're referring to color managed workflows that remove the viewing device like a CRT monitor from defining the look of the edits, then yes, it was a huge improvement and important but freakin' complicated in getting everyone to set up with their own processing workflows that even NASA engineers were complaining to Adobe about the complexity.

I read that about 12 years ago in a well known digital photography magazine article on the subject. Obviously I wasn't surprised and yet a bit elated in finding I wasn't the only one complaining.