Do you run SL on a color calibrated monitor?

As a graphic designer, it's always important to make sure my monitor is color collaborated.

Um, is it possible you explain to me exactly how to do that?

Adobe has a product you can use to calibrate: Adobe Gamma.

http://kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=321608&sliceId=1

Adobe Gamma comes with PS...if you don't have that...hmmm...I'm not sure. Google 'Color Management.'

Thanks Michael, I have Photoshop Elements but mostly use PSP and sometimes The Gimp.

I think it was me who might have given you this impression. What I said was:



I've seen people complain a lot about readability when their monitors where just miss adjusted. I never meant to imply that you need to color calibrate your monitor to play SL .

You only need to have a color calibrated monitor if you create content that needs a high degree of color fidelity. For everyday use just messing with the controls colors brightness and contrast look good or reseting the controls of your monitor to their default settings would be enough.

The monitors I use at work are not color calibrated and they look great! - I would not suggest you need to calibrate your monitor to play SL ever. I do calibrate the monitors in my home office, I use these to work on the photos/prints that I sell.

So, if it was me putting forth absurd ideas, sorry for the confusion.

.d

Well I just played around with my built-in monitor settings (the ones that are controlled with the little buttons on my monitor) and the NVidia color calibration program that came with the card. Made absolutely no difference.

Your mileage may vary...

.d

You have the computer from hell and you're playing on an old IBM green??

Dude, wtf.

LOL

Its not the colors -

Its the whiteout on your screen from trying to fix typos.

I'm wiping off the drink I just sprayed all over my screen when you made me laugh like that!

I recently became concerned about how accurate my notebook monitor was when I started creating more textures so i went out and bought a cheapy Spyder2Express colorimeter. Didn't work very well since black luminance became way too dark and all shadow detail was lost. SL became unplayable if the client wasn't set to daylight. Not sure if it is because my monitor is limited or if the colorimeter was too cheap, but the next step up is twice the price.

I don't know I am just glad I can see color and not having to see Second Life in green, black and white. hehe

I still use a 19" Dell CRT. No need to really "calibrate".

I'm using a dual monitor setup using two different types of monitors (24" and 19" (cheap) LCD). I did some form of manual calibration, but the color spaces/brightness/contrast of both screens differs so much, and as I'm not using them for any print output, i've decided to go with a more 'comfortable' setting, so the outputs of both doesn't differ too much.

Exact color calibration is kind of useless nowadays. Except when you do a lot of print work, you can assume that whatever you will produce will look completely different on 99% of the monitors out there.

(Oh my 17" mbp, is calibrated as best as possible.

this!

You could have told me that BEFORE I painted most of my screen white.

I don't color correct, though I've done this kind of thing in the past.

I think with Second Life there are two main problems - one is with gamma, such that dark objects just look black or muddy, and the other is mainly with reds/oranges/browns. Insofar as something that looks a rich brown to one person can look like a garish orange to someone else. Commonly seen with mid-tone wood textures. Both correctable of course.

Another point: perception. For instance, black can look deep black when your monitor is on, and your brain is correcting for things. But shut off the monitor and the whole thing, now not emitting any light of its own, just looks grey.

This is why it's common for televisions to be terribly off calibration, and nobody really notices or cares much. Yet put two televisions next to each other, and everybody's a critic because the differences are painfully obvious then.

it actually took me a year to realise that my last monitor was incapable of displaying the colour green!
once i plugged in the new monitor it was a world of difference to me.

Bear in mind that if you have a standard TN LCD monitor (ie, you walked into a computer store and asked for the best value LCD) then probably colour calibrating will be a waste of time as the monitor can't control the liquid crystals precisely enough to create exact colours anyway.

That's a common problem and computer monitors. If you adjust the screen to the technically "correct" settings you lose too much shadow detail; it's because the displays don't handle dark areas of the screen well. I haven't calibrated any of my computer monitors (don't own a colorimeter and don't see enough need for one to justify the expense) but I have done the adjustments on my large screen TV -- and I intentionally have the contrast set "incorrectly" (and thus the black levels not black enough) because I prefer to see more shadow detail.

Accuracy of color reproduction is unlikely to be important for many SL residents; even if you're a builder, it's not that critical because hardly anybody else will have a properly adjusted display anyway. You don't want the colors to be wildly off, but slight errors just don't matter much. If you have the calibration hardware because you need or want it for other purposes (you're a graphic artist, you watch movies on your computer, etc.) you might as well go ahead and calibrate your SL system -- but as I said, you still might not want to adjust the gray scale the way the colorimeter says you should.