My 9 year old computer finally crashed a couple of weeks ago. I got a new HP with an LCD monitor. I don't know much about calibrating and have always had a hard time with it even following the steps I've found online but I finally got my old one just right. This new one is giving me fits. Everything looks so faded and the colors are way off. A blue sky looks green. I can adjust the brightness and contrast which helps a little but still not really correct. Can anyone tell me what do I need to do to get this all set up right?
Nan

hi,
could be several things... maybe graphic card drivers need to be reinstalled however.... a couple of things i would check first.. is make sure your cable connected and seated well... I don't know if your using analog or digital inputs but I do know with analog inputs , you can easily lose a color if the jack not seated correctly... and the other two colors become very dominant.

another possibility is go into your display properties>advance .. with most graphic cards, generally under the color tab there a gamma setting that make a big difference your colors and brightness...
My 9 year old computer finally crashed a couple of weeks ago. I got a new HP with an LCD monitor. I don't know much about calibrating and have always had a hard time with it even following the steps I've found online but I finally got my old one just right. This new one is giving me fits. Everything looks so faded and the colors are way off. A blue sky looks green. I can adjust the brightness and contrast which helps a little but still not really correct. Can anyone tell me what do I need to do to get this all set up right?
Nan

Rightclick on your desktop and select Properties. Then go to the Settings tab and click on Advanced. Then click on the Color Management tab and tell us what profile is selected.

Also, do you have Adobe Gamma in your Startup folder?

Regardless of the solution, you might want to consider picking up a hardware calibrator. You can get them for $80 (or less) nowadays.

Everything seems to be connected right. The profiles I have available are
Adobe RGB1998
Color Match RGB
HP vs 15
Kodak dc
sRGB Color Space Profile
I've tried all of them and nothing makes much difference. There are some controls on the side of the monitor to adjust brightness and contrast and color temperature but nothing for gamma. Also, the quality of my photos look horrible. I have a Canon camera that is only a few months old and on my old monitor, I could view the photos and count the pores and individual hairs when I zoomed in. On this one the photos look like they are all at 72 instead of 300dpi. Very pixelated. I'm lost with this.
Nan

hi,
curious.... what screen resolution and color resolution do you have your graphic card setup for?

On the gamma setting that won't be on the monitor but in your graphic card settings.... after you get to your display properties> settings>go to advance> and generally , maybe under a different tab, under the color tab you should see a gamma control slide bar.....
note: on some cheaper graphic cards there may not be a gamma setting..

Everything seems to be connected right. The profiles I have available are
Adobe RGB1998
Color Match RGB
HP vs 15
Kodak dc
sRGB Color Space Profile
I've tried all of them and nothing makes much difference. There are some controls on the side of the monitor to adjust brightness and contrast and color temperature but nothing for gamma. Also, the quality of my photos look horrible. I have a Canon camera that is only a few months old and on my old monitor, I could view the photos and count the pores and individual hairs when I zoomed in. On this one the photos look like they are all at 72 instead of 300dpi. Very pixelated. I'm lost with this.
Nan

Hi, I did dig a little deeper and found where I can change the gamma. I think I'll be able to get that corrected. Right now I'm still trying to figure out what to do about the poor image quality I'm seeing. I found a setting for quality but it only seems to make the pixelization worse.
My screen resolution is 1024x768. Color quality, Highest 32 bit.
Nan

Nan, your previous monitor may have used Adobe Gamma or some other control panel to that was associated with your last monitor configuration. These control panels are almost always set to turn on when your computer powers up. They are usually the last thing to load when your PC finishes booting up and they load in all of the settings / profile previously eatablished for that monitor. If a new one was installed and the old one was not delete (for example Adobe Gamma), the old one will often rule at startup.
I suggest you do the following:
Go to your start menu and go Start>Run. When the dialog box comes back, type msconfig and hit enter. When msconfig comes up, click on the startup tab and run through the list. See if you have more than one item that looks like it could be associated with monitor settings (Adobe Gamma, for Viewsonic Monitors its called Perfect Suite). I do not know what HP uses but it likely came on the CD that came with your HP monitor. Also if you have ever used a Hardware calibration device like Huey or Spyder, check to see if those are turned on. Only one should be active.
Perhaps this will be causing your problem. Good Luck
Regards, Murray

Hi Murray,
This is a new computer and new monitor so nothing from the old monitor would be interfering. At least I think that was what you were saying the problem might me.
Thanks,
Nan

Nan, check out this site:

http://www.hex2bit.com/products/product_mcw.asp

There's a download for a free calibration software that might be helpful.

Nan, something could have been installed on the initial build of your new computer. I still recommend that you examine what is currently in your Startup items.
Regards, Murray

Hi,
I'm still having major problems with this monitor. The colors aren't going to be a problem now but the image quality I see with photos on the monitor is bad. I've been talking to HP tech support for 2 days. They've had me run diagnostics and even had me download the original driver last night and it didn't help. They also told me to plug my old monitor into this computer. I did and the photo quality was just as bad. The only thing they could suggest was to ship the computer back to them for repair. I just don't think there is anything wrong with it and that they would send it back the same. For general viewing everything looks perfect. It's when I zoom in on photos that I see pixelization and fuzziness.
This is an HP Pavilion a1610n with an nVIDIA GeForce 6150 LE graphics card.
It also has Windows XP Media Center Edition installed on it.
I'm wondering if there's just a setting somewhere that isn't right. I'm kind of technically challenged so I don't know where to look.
I'm also noticing that Paint Shop Pro is freezing up a lot now.
Any suggestions?

Nan, one suggestion I have isc to do the following as a cross check:

1. On some site like imageshack.us or other where you can upload more than 100KB file, post the unedited highest resolution of an image that is representative of the problem.

2.Zoom in on the image until it looks bad as you have describe in your thread. At that point take a screen shot by holding the Alt key and hitting the Prnt Scrn key. The click on PS and just paste the image from your clip board into a new PS doc. Save it as psd or jpg 12 (least compressed) and upload it as well. Some of us who have well functioning systems can at least rule out a problem with the image or your version of PS. The images may also provide some clues as to what may be happening with your video board.

Regards, Murray

Hi,
I'm still having major problems with this monitor. The colors aren't going to be a problem now but the image quality I see with photos on the monitor is bad. I've been talking to HP tech support for 2 days. They've had me run diagnostics and even had me download the original driver last night and it didn't help. They also told me to plug my old monitor into this computer. I did and the photo quality was just as bad. The only thing they could suggest was to ship the computer back to them for repair. I just don't think there is anything wrong with it and that they would send it back the same. For general viewing everything looks perfect. It's when I zoom in on photos that I see pixelization and fuzziness.
This is an HP Pavilion a1610n with an nVIDIA GeForce 6150 LE graphics card.
It also has Windows XP Media Center Edition installed on it.
I'm wondering if there's just a setting somewhere that isn't right. I'm kind of technically challenged so I don't know where to look.
I'm also noticing that Paint Shop Pro is freezing up a lot now.Any suggestions?

Nvidia has a graphics driver for your card released in Nov 2006 make sure that video driver your using is the latest. PSP was having problems (crashing) with older nvidia drivers.

Have you tried update your monitors driver assuming its an HP Monitor (http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?lc=en&cc=us&dlc=en&os=228&product=3239117&rule=32839&lang=en&docname=bph02073)? It could be that XP isn't using the Monitors Driver that happened to me when I installed a dell monitor.

Murray,
I did the screenshots. I don't know if I did them right or not. I couldn't save as a PS file. I'm using PSP. The links to two examples are below.

geru,
HP sent me download the original driver last night which didn't make a difference but I will check out the new release.
Honestly, I'm beginning to think that this monitor just isn't going to display good photo quality.
Nan

http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o174/Nan18_photos/Cara2.jpg
http://i120.photobucket.com/albums/o174/Nan18_photos/Jackie2.jpg

Hello Nan

Don't know if you have fixed the problem yet but my son had the same as you described (well almost). His settings were 1024x768 but the native resolution of the monitor is 1280 x1024. His problem disappeared when he changed his screen to match the native resolution.

Manorts