Weird calibration with Huey

[Venek]

Hoping someone here can help me out.

I got my Pantone Huey in the mail today and of course, I went right to work to calibrate my BenQ FP241VW. It's turning out differently than I thought it would. The first time, the screen was wayyyy too red for my taste. So I did some more tweaking in NVIDIA's color correction tool and it's a little better now after calibrating it again, but maybe a little too blue. I feel like I'm missing something here, like a default setting for my gamma or something. I already knew about setting the brightness and contrast beforehand as the Huey doesn't set that. Should I just put my NVIDIA prefs to default settings and the BenQ back to factory defaults and then only set the brightness and contrast on the monitor and then calibrate?

Thanks in advance!

 

[mlewis]

Should I just put my NVIDIA prefs to default settings and the BenQ back to factory defaults and then only set the brightness and contrast on the monitor and then calibrate?

Yes but leave the contrast at the default setting.

 

[ki_cz]

Hmm, there's been quite a few reports of the Huey not calibrating properly becuase of hardware defaults. I'm not sure how much of a point the Huey has for your if you are manually calibrating with NVIDIA's tool afterwards.

 

[Lord Kimbo]

I have a Huey Pro and can comment.

Before you run the Huey calibration wizard, you need to set your video card settings to defaults, and your monitor to defaults. Then change your monitor contrast and brightness settings to 75%.

Once you have done that, run the wizard. Make sure the area of your screen that you attached the Huey device is perfectly clean as that can cause problems in how the device sees the colours. You should not change your display settings after it is calibrated. That defeats the purpose.

Typical responses from people that use a hardware calibration tool is 'wow, it changed my colours so much I think it is screwed up'. I know as I said it at first too. A common complaint with the cheap Huey device is a green or brown colour cast. My monitors have a bit of a green colour cast that I think should not be there. However it isn't that bad and even with this small observation, the calibrated display is way way better than the unit not calibrated.

It does take a bit of time to adjust to the new colours as the monitors are setup to impress people in the store with how bright and vibrant they are. But that isn't the real world, nor is it the way images print, so the calibration tool will make your monitor more 'true to life' in its colour saturation and should match very well to images that you have printed at a quality print shop.

 

[Benny]

What settings did you use?

I'm not too familiar with the huey but I think it only gives presets like, "web and photo editing" which should than calibrate to standard 2.2 gamma and 6500K white point.

It's also possible that you are so used to your monitor being set to a high color temperature (blueish) that the "right" color will look wrong to you. ^^; ..

Try setting your Display to sRGB color or 6500K color temperature (or if the color can only be adjusted by RGB channels, set all to 100%).
Leave all nvidia settings on standard. (or whatever doesn't try to "enhance" the picture)
This should give you the closest starting point for getting the display to standard Neutral white (6500K) the monitor settings are usually off by a few kelvin.
Than calibrate with the Huey for "web and photo editing" or something like that.
With the settings above it shouldn't change the color temperature too much and only refine a little, changing the gamma to 2.2.

As sometimes written in this forum, calibration doesn't necessarily make things look better, it only makes them look the same as on other displays calibrated to the same target.. which is only important if you create content or are interested to see content the way it was originally intended to be seen.. which might be a matter of taste.

EDIT:
I just took a look at the Lesnumeriques/behardware review.. ( http://www.lesnumeriques.com/duels.php?ty=6&ma1=48&mo1=229&p1=2117&ma2=119&ph=5 diagram shows how far the colors are off ) It seems the monitor is really a tad on the blue side. So what you're experiencing is probably that your used to "wrong" color.
Try calibrating the monitor the way we described, it'll probably look to red at first... ( If calibrated correctly the color of white on the monitor should look somewhat like the white of a sheet of paper lit by a overcast sky or a cool daylight fluorescent lightbulb. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_temperature )
but don't mess with the setting after calibration afterwards, just go to sleep and take a look at them in the morning with a new set of eyes.
Our brain and eyes get used to the things we see, that's how we can still recognize the same color at dawn and noon, although they look completely different when photographed with the same camera settings.

 

[Venek]

All right, thanks everyone for the input.

I came back home from work today and set both my video card and monitor settings to default. I set the brightness and contrast to 75% each as Lord Kimbo suggested, it seems like a safe combination.

I went ahead and let Huey do its thing and, sure enough, it looked just like it did the first time I calibrated it, like it was too red. I decided to stick with it, though, and let my eyes adjust. I installed the color management add-on for Firefox, found the ICC file and applied it. Now it's been a solid half-hour since I calibrated it, so let me look at the before/after in the prefs box.

HUGE difference. In fact, when I opened up Thunderbird, I had no idea every other line of e-mail was highlighted a light pink! Defaults were way too bright, so I guess it DID calibrate it properly? Have to play a few games to really get an idea, Flight Simulator should prove to be a good test.

 

[Venek]

Here's a quick update...

As it turns out, I got a defective Huey after learning that there have been reports of screens exhibiting an unnatural color cast after calibration, and that's exactly what happened to me. Even though I got mine off eBay, Pantone was kind enough to send me a replacement which definitely worked this time.

So if anyone out there with a Huey is reading this and is experiencing the same problem I did, go to Pantone's web site and enter 'color cast' in the search box and you'll be able to figure out what to do from there.

What a HUGE difference a color corrected display makes!

 

[zenzog]

mine has a slight blue cast, but nothing particularly annoying or anything... still, what exactly did you find on pantone's website? i typed color cast in the search box and didn't really find anything that seemed relevant.

 

[chklin]

mine has a slight blue cast, but nothing particularly annoying or anything... still, what exactly did you find on pantone's website? i typed color cast in the search box and didn't really find anything that seemed relevant.

http://pantone.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/1690

Make sure that you are not using any of the "Special: Cool" color settings; those settings use a high color temperature which adds a blue cast. If you are not sure whether it's the colorimeter or your eyes, set your monitor to "daylight" white balance and take a picture of the calibrated screen displaying white. If the white area on screen comes out significantly blue (use an image editor to check the pixel RGB values), then there is probably a problem with your Huey.