Color problem

Thanks for the link, that was an interesting and fun read. Okay, maybe it shouldn't be called "fun". 😉

A lot of links in that thread no longer worked, so it was a bit more difficult to get through, but the main points still came across. Condensed down, this is what I see.

If you look at the 3D profile map about midway through the thread, it shows an sRGB color space overlaid with your created profile. Since your fully saturated blue is way out beyond the same blue of sRGB, a linear plot to white brings your blue across the violet of sRGB. On the surface, it makes sense. However, your monitor can't display two profiles at the same time, so the reference to sRGB doesn't apply.

Such a reference only counts when you're converting from one color space to the next. But even then, it's not that linear. When you convert between profiles, certain points are always lined up to maintain visual color between them as closely as possible. They are:

End Points:

White
Black

Gamut:

Red
Green
Blue
Cyan
Magenta
Yellow

These are the gamut points. Everything else in between, moving from the gamut colors towards white and black is the range. Once the gamut points have been distributed, then the range is calculated in a linear fashion between them. So in the end, blue should still always be blue.

That does depend though on what you're converting to. An RGB to RGB profile should always maintain pretty close color. At least as long as one of them isn't from a really old worn out monitor that has lost most of its clarity. But RGB to CMYK will create all kinds of color shifts in the most saturated colors. Blue in particular.

When you go from a 0,0,255 RGB blue to CMYK, you are doing some major clipping. CMYK can't ever hope to reproduce that color, so it gets as close as it can. First, the cyan will be saturated as much as possible since that's the closest pure color to RGB blue. But solid cyan alone doesn't have enough weight to match the luminance of RGB blue. So what can Photoshop or a printer do to make up the "too bright" color of only cyan? It loads up on the next most saturated hue it has to work with, magenta. Hence, your pure RGB blues turn purple/violet in CMYK. That's all well and good to explain a purple shift, but still doesn't apply to your monitor, which itself has nothing to do with CMYK.

Near the end of the thread, one user had a solution that shouldn't work, as expressed by others there. They copied their created profile to the /System/Library/ColorSync/Profiles/ folder and deleted it from the original location. After restarting, then blue remained blue!!! This makes zero sense since it's still exactly the same file with the same data. Its location shouldn't make a whit of difference, but the poster says it did.

So what the heck, give it a try. Copy your created profile to the /System/Library/ColorSync/Profiles/ folder, delete it from whichever other Profiles folder it's originally in and restart. Can't hurt anything to find out.

That didn't help. Unfortunately blue is still violet.

Not surprising it didn't help since it shouldn't.

Now after I changed my luminance value to sth about 120 this magenta shift is really noticeable in whites, especially in upper part of LCD cause it somewhere at my eye sights.

It's not unusual for your whites and lighter grays to look slightly pink compared to surrounding incandescent lights when your white point is set to 5000K. If it's obviously pink, then something is wrong. 6500K should always appear to be a strong bluish white.

As far as I understand this is because my highest blue point after calibration lays somewhere out of sRGB and Adobe RGB profile (important when working in ProPhoto RGB my blue is absolutely fine)

ProPhoto RGB is a huge color space. So your monitor's most saturated blue is still well inside of that profile. Regardless, blue should still remain blue. My current monitor is a bit short of Adobe RGB in most colors, so to try and simulate your problem, I made ProPhoto RGB my working color space and created this simple color gamut image in Photoshop.



If my system were to have the same issue as yours, blue should turn violet when I open the file using my monitor profile as the working RGB space in Photoshop. It doesn't. The converted file displays exactly the same as it does with ProPhoto RGB as the working space. ColorSync is doing just what it's supposed to do. It's lining up 0,0,255 of ProPhoto RGB to the same 0,0,255 gamut point of my monitor's profile. Does the same with Adobe RGB, sRGB, or any other RGB space I choose. All conversions work the same.

Next why this thing is happening?

At this point, I don't think it's an issue with the profiles you create, but rather a video problem. On a Macbook Pro, I can't believe that Apple would be using a digital to VGA conversion between the video hardware and the LCD screen. If they were, then it could possibly be problem with the RAMDAC (Random Access Memory Digital to Analog Conversion) chip of the video hardware. It would be assigning the wrong RGB values to the converted data. But this is unlikely. I don't have the specs to prove it, but I'd have to think it's a straight digital to digital signal.

Next could be the video card having problems with the LUT (Look Up Table) being sent to it from your created profile. It could also be the video card's software driver being used by the OS. But then again, it could be the colorimeter. If it's sending bad information back to the software, it would cause the app to create a bad profile.

I'd like to give you more information, but I can only provide suggestions based on what you relate and what I can, or cannot reproduce on my end.

First, let me apologize for leading you on a bit of a wild goose chase. I started thinking too deeply about the various possibilities and overlooked something we caught at the beginning of this thread. When I had you change your display profile to a canned one, you responded:

You're right when I've changed profile it's ok.

So that means there's nothing wrong with the video card, it's ability to correctly load a LUT, or the driver. Whether or not it has a RAMDAC is irrelevant.

It all comes back to the profiles created with your colorimeter.

When I convert from ProPhotoRGB to Adobe RGB o sRGB I have a blue shift into violet.

That's actually not correct. That is, it's not the fault of Adobe RGB or sRGB. Assuming you're using your created monitor profile in the Displays panel, that's where the problem is. No matter what you're using as your working RGB color space in Photoshop, the last conversion is always to your monitor profile. So for example, if you have Adobe RGB set as your working RGB space, Photoshop converts the ProPhoto RGB space to Adobe RGB. But that's not the final conversion. The system then has to convert Adobe RGB to your monitor profile, whatever that may be.

So what's happening is you have no problems using a provided profile, but do when you have your created profile set as the Display profile. That means the problem is all in the colorimeter, or the Eye-One Match software.

Try downloading a fresh copy of Eye-One Match from X-Rite's site and install it. If that doesn't fix the problem, then the colorimeter is faulty.

There are a couple of ways to prove, or disprove your theory.

One would be for you to send me low res copies of your files. Both the original and the converted ones. If the values have actually moved to violet, then I should see the same thing.

What I'm getting at is that there may really be nothing wrong with the conversions. By that I mean the translation from ProPhoto RGB to Adobe RGB or sRGB were actually done correctly. So the file itself really is 0,0,255 where it's supposed to be on the converted files. BUT, your created monitor profile can't display the values correctly and displays 0,0,255 as a violet. Since that's what the monitor is displaying, that's what both Photoshop and the DigitalColor Meter report as the RGB values.

For the following two test, make sure to save each file with the RGB profile embedded that is the working RGB color in Photoshop at the time so Photoshop knows the which color space they were created in. Also, make sure to let Photoshop convert them to to the current working space as you open them.

Test #1. Close Photoshop and change your Displays profile to Generic RGB, ColorMatch RGB, or some other default display profile. Launch Photoshop again and make the working RGB space the same as the monitor profile. Open the images that appeared violet. Are they still violet, or do they now display blue and read 0,0,255?

If they display violet, perform test #2. While still using a generic Displays profile in the System Preferences, create the test image again in ProPhoto RGB. Do the same conversions and note what does, or doesn't happen to the blues. I'm betting they'll remain blue. Save each converted file in its color space. Close Photoshop and change your Displays profile in the System Preferences back to your created profile. Launch Photoshop.

Now do two tests with the files saved while the system monitor profile was a generic choice. Open the files you saved from that state, converting to the current working RGB color space. Close the files and open them again, telling Photoshop to use the embedded profile. If in both cases, blues you know were blue using a generic display profile now show as violet, then you know your created profile is no good.

On a side note, it was a bit humorous to myself to finally figure out what "sth" meant. Your English is overall very good, but I was stuck on that one for a while. The word you're looking for is "its".

Well, we now definitely know the profiles you're creating are bad. The question is why? As I mentioned above, I've calibrated quite a few laptops and never had that kind of shifting. So that makes me think the colorimeter is out of whack. Is it still under warranty?

I can't remember, have you tried this same colorimeter on another monitor of any kind? What were the results there if you did?

Most of the laptops I've calibrated with it have been older PowerPC based laptops. I haven't had anybody come by with an Intel based unit yet.

There's also a possibility that the specific type of video hardware in your laptop is preventing you from getting a proper profile. Run the System Profiler and see what kind of video you have. It's going to either be ATI or NVidia.