Color Management: Vista

[tommac]

I have just bought a new laptop that runs vista. The problem is the colours are really awful!! So first step calibrate the thing. So now I have neutral colours on the computer but I'm not really happy with what I'm seeing on firefox (colour management is set to 1 in config). Also I edited a load of photos on the laptop and took them into work to compare against my Mac G5 and although the colours are a little over saturated every thing is too dark. So to summarise it looks like vista runs it's screens really bright and too punchy even when calibrated. Any suggestions on me getting balanced workflow? It's driving me up the wall.
Thanks

[Littlecoo]

From what you just described, it seems to me that the problem is an overly bright laptop display. Reduce the display's overall brightness and/or gamma and see if that makes a difference.

[tommac]

Thanks for getting back to me Littlecoo. I was kinda reluctant to change the brightness of the screen as it's apparently the correct setting for a moderatly lit room according to my calabrater. But it does seem like the obvious soulution. Any idea what the gamma setting sould be for a laptop screen?

[GregKnapp]

I sort of had this problem with both my laptops, my windows vista laptop is a dell 1720 and only has a brightness adjustment. I finally found the gamma and contrast adjustment under the video card's control panel. Google "monitor calibration picture" and you should get a few good photos to calibrate off of.

My Mac on the other hand had a different problem. No matter what I did I could not get the LCD calibrated.. the darks from 0% until 15% all looked black and the whites from 85% to 100% were pure white. The middle range looked ok, color was vibrant and all. The problem wound up being not in the displays' control panel nor was it the LCD screen going bad (as I thought) but rather it was under "universal access" control panel.. the macbook pro was set to higher contrast. As soon as I turned it to normal everything looked better and I was able to successfully calibrate it !

Good luck and dont forget to check the OS settings, and the control panels for your graphic card.

-Greg