Do you run SL on a color calibrated monitor?

The goal of the question is to find out if the computer that you normally use to run Second Life is calibrated for correct color output. A monitor's output may change over time, so a yes answer would require that you recalibrate every so often, say at least once every three months.

I wouldn't know hun..Its a SyncMaster 226BW..1678 X 974? Maybe thats why Im having troubles not being able to run somethings that clearly state they are vista compatible.

Lana

P.S. How would I find out?

Errr... how do I calibrate the color on my monitor?

If you own the monitor and are in charge of it and you don't know what it means to calibrate your monitor, then your monitor is not calibrated.

Calibrating your monitor for correct color output can be done in more than one way.

You can get devices with light sensors that run a program that generates color values and reads the output levels at different frequencies and makes appropriate adjustments.

You can do manual calibrations. One way would be to adjust your monitor's color settings to get as good a match as possible to printed accurate color samples such as a PMS chart.

I suspect the percentage of people running Second Life on a monitor that is calibrated for correct color output is exceeding small, less than a tenth of a percent.

On some of the older ones there used to be buttons center of the screen bottom..I don't have that on mine but i think they're somewhere hidden.Sort've afraid to mess with them.

~Lana

Mine has different calibration sets cos I also need it properly calibrated for Photoshop....

For people using a Mac;

You can easily adjust your display to show accurate color using the Display Calibrator Assistant. The colors you perceive on your display can be altered by many factors, such as ambient light, the position and angle of the display, and the age of the display. You should calibrate your display regularly to ensure accurate color.

Open System Preferences and click Displays.
Click Color.
Click Calibrate. The Display Calibrator Assistant walks you through calibrating your display.
If you wish to do a more detailed calibration of your display, select the Expert Mode checkbox.

With this explanation, I can confidently say that no, I am not running SL on a color-calibrated monitor.

Well You get a colorimeter thingie (sorry for the technical terms..) - Like a 'Color Spider' or EyeOne and then use it monthly or as needed to calibrate your monitor. Its a relatively painless process and if you care about color fidelity it is a must.

I use to make sure the work I do on photos is accurate...

.d

For the info about how to calibrate a mac. One of the healthier aspects of playing SL for me is it gets me to learn new things about my computer. Thanks for your expertise. Now I gotta run and see how this affects the clothes I just bought!

As a RL photographer, my equipement must be calibrated. So yes, all my computers have had their monitors calibrated with a Spyder2. Does it enhance my SL experience? Not really.

Yeah, suddenly I feel the need for Windows instructions for dummies.

Sorry, is this a program that I can download from the net, or is this like a physical color wheel that I hold in my hand and compare it to the colors on my monitor? I'm dense, I know...

Expertise? Good Golly, don't you start spreading rumours about me, LOL. I assure you, I am nothing of the sort. I only learned what a 'url' was last summer. I do agree with you, though. SL has helped me tremendously with the how-to's of using my 'puter

*Oryx, I think it IS a small program. Mine came with, but I don't know about Windows.

Hmmm, it is actually a device that you use Oryx.. You can get one at amazon for relatively few dollars, or you can spend a lot of money in a full system. Some apps have ways to help calibration using your eyesight but I wouldn't trust my eyes...

If you do a lot of color work... where you want the print and the screen to match or you want to represent accurate colors then its a good investment. But remember, you really need this only if you are going to create content that needs to be accurate.

I use an eyeone by Gretag MacBeth (now X-Rite) but I started with a cheaper color spyder and it was better.

.d

I answered no. I'm not sure how to calibrate my EGA monitor.

I play on an old IBM Green Screen monitor

All I see is SL in ASCII style!!

No. Mine looks fine as it is anyway.

Does that mean I have to use the correct crayon when colouring my mono-chome monitor?

Yet another reminder that no two people are seeing the same thing in SL. That's kind of a daunting fact for people making art, or putting a lot of work into textures, etc.

I have three monitors at home, two for me and one for my daughter. None of them is color calibrated. I have used the monitors controls to adjust brightness, contrast, size, position, etc, and that's about it. The colors suit me alright on them. I have played with the color adjustments you can get to in the video card control software but I end up setting it back to default because it suited me on default.

We stopped calibrating the monitors where I work because the large format printers are such a pain to get proper consistent color from, and have a limited range of colors, that it just wasn't worth the effort, so there's a colorimeter sitting next to the monitor collecting dust. For other types of graphics businesses, using a colorimeter daily might make sense.

I've never heard of any normal person buying a colorimeter to use for a computer for email, word processing, surfing the internet, twittering, or playing video games.

Folks that use their surfing/email/games computer for professional graphics work might well want to calibrate their monitors, and for that matter, folks that are used to calibrated monitors at work might want their home computers to match what they look at all day at work, even though it might not make any practical difference in their home use, if their home is just normal casual computer use.

Someone suggested that some of the color/brightness text foreground background combinations in the SL interface are hard to distinguish on some folks monitors because their monitors need to be color calibrated. It's easy to select color combinations that show up well on nearly any functional monitor. The suggestion seemed quite absurd to me. Most of us don't feel the need to calibrate our monitors because the flesh tones and sky colors and grass colors and text and menu colors seem adequate to us. What's the chance folks would be motivated to calibrate their monitors in order to make a color combination in the SL interface more distinguishable when they know the colors could have chosen better by the interface designers?

I guess me answer should be yes, my moniter is calibrated. I use software called ForteManager that came with my LG Flatron LCD moniter.

Read more about it here:

http://www.portrait.com/dtune/lge/enu/overview.html

It auto calibrates the moniter to allow for different enviroment, light , ect. It works really well, and the colours and brightness I get are vibrant and perfect.

One thing to point out here is that it's difficult to say what "correct calibration" actually means. If you're a photographer, like Lolita, then "correct" means the colors you're seeing on-screen look the same as those produced by your printer. If you're a videographer, then "correct" would mean your monitor's colors look like the colors you'll see on an average TV. There's no such thing as universal correctness.

That said, there are some generalities that can (and should) be applied. At the very least, contrast and basic color tuning should be adjusted to ensure you're not missing out on things you're supposed to be seeing. A discussion about the coloring of this forum a few weeks ago, and then another recent one about the colors of certain GUI elements in SL, revealed that a lot of people's screens atrociously out of whack.

That's a real annoyance for texture artists. Spend countless hours subtly shading a texture to make it look as good as any texture possibly can, only to find that 90% of the people who are looking at it can't even see what's on it. That can be frustrating.

And it is kind of a strange idea. Calibration is great for matching things to each other, but our eyes aren't calibrated and everyone perceives color a little, and sometimes a lot, differently.



And of course the content hasn't been calibrated to any single standard, it's a mish mash from countless creators. For the UI, it would be nice if LL would pay more attention to type that scales down a little more readably, and if they could remember that contrast is really really important.

Hmmm... the colors on my monitor look fine to me but as a texture maker I wonder if there's something I could do to make sure my textures look good to everyone else... Hard to think what though.