Stop doing Color Management!

freundTech@feddit.de to Programmer Humor@programming.dev – 414 points –
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FML, I've had to try to color matching by eye before between different screens by the same manufacturer.
For whatever reason I wasn't provided with any calibration tools. I had some vague software tools to try and get them to align.
I spent like 8 hours trying to match these for the corporate brand colors, while still looking decent for everything else.
Shit is near impossible. If the manufacturer couldn't do it, how am I supposed to?! And with awful interfaces and no concrete way of measuring.
Like, I was taking pictures of the screens, then trying to figure out offsets and how they might relate to gamma triangles.

Client was appreciative of my (and fellow techs) efforts, but ultimately wasn't happy, and it looked shit.
That was awkward as fuck.

I've never done anything close to the color calibration work, in part because my vision is color-deficient by default, so any tools or processes relying on my own visual acuity isn't going to come out right.

However, I was under the impression that there existed external tools that basically did exactly what you were trying: Taking actual images of the screen in a controlled way and comparing it to physical (or at least a known-good digital) copy of that same image and outputting the "right" profile.

Is that made-up bullshit someone fed me and I never cared to verify it?

They exist, but the display needs to interface with the tool.

Yeh, you get a special camera and some software. Whether the camera looks at the whole screen, or it is something you put directly against it depends on the system.
If you are just doing relative calibration (IE making screens look the same without caring about the actual calibration) I think they can work with just a DSLR.