I have a Dell Inspiron E1705, and I would like to calibrate my monitor to be able to view the same color quality in my photos on the internet as I see them in Paint Shop Pro 7 (my editing program). I noticed there are 26 color profiles in the Color Management section of my display properties, and I do not know which one to add. Can anyone help? Thank you!
September 2nd, 2010 on 9:03 am
You might want to be sure you’re understanding color management correctly, first. If you start adding or converting to various profiles without knowing what you’re doing you can mess things up pretty badly.
When done correctly, you would use a hardware device (like a Spyder3) to develop a color profile for your monitor. That’s how you get your monitor calibrated to a standard, and you can remove any imbalanced color tints it has, etc.
Files you end up putting on the internet would ultimately need to end up in sRGB to display correctly. sRGB is already the default for most cameras if you’re shooting JPEG’s. Sometimes people will shoot in in a broader gamut like Adobe RGB (aRGB) or as RAW files, etc., though, so they can get into needing to color convert if going to the web.
The odds are that *none* of the 26 color profiles you have showing are things you should assign to your monitor. They’re very likely all generic, standard profiles that are used elsewhere. Your monitor needs its own made custom.
Sometimes an individual model of monitor will have a more-or-less consistent profile, and the manufacturer will provide one. It’s not as good as calibrating your individual monitor, but it can be better than nothing.
Anyway, if there’s a color profile that has your monitor name already, it’s probably good enough for now, and was something from the manufacturer that went in likely alongside any driver you installed.
But otherwise none of those profiles should get assigned to your monitor. You need to find a way to calibrate your monitor and make a profile, and that’s generally going to require an additional piece of hardware (with accompanying software).