What tools do you use for calibration?

What model monitor do you have? If it's a low end panel, even if you have 100% sRGB gamut coverage, your calibration results may be disappointing. I had the exact same experience until I bought a Gigabyte M32U which cost me a pretty penny, but after calibration using the exact same methods I had always used before, it looks stunning.

It's pretty simple: OLED works in a very different way compared to LCD. So when you edit the highlights and the shadows especially they will be represented in a different way on an OLED display compared to an LCD. Also you don't know what color gamut your iPhone is using but it's most likely DCI-P3 so yout photos will look awful.

On my phone I'm pretty close to sRGB so, even if it's an OLED, I get good sRGB reproduction. Maybe try to edit one in different color gamut settings to figure it out.

First of all your benQ gaming monitor is going to have shit colors , doesn’t matter that it says 100% sRGB. The panel is made for quick response time and not color accuracy.

Second of all, calibrating a monitor needs to be done with an external device. Something that can read monitor values from the outside. It doesn’t matter how accurate the software side is if the hardware side is lacking.

Now 10 for your sentiment 10 years ago more or less every consumer device had shit displays. Today you have much more variation on high end consumer devices, you have phones and TVs with OLED screens, you have ipads with microLEDs, you have phones with normal LED screens etc etc , some of these displays have HDR capabilities some don’t.

The monitor you’re using is probably way worse than the display you had in your macbook pro.

Color accurate monitors for PCs are expensive and they still need a calibration with an external device since their out of factory performance isn’t the best.

On the other hand you have apple products that love them or hate them, there’s a reason they’re an industry standard. A 1.5k studio display will give you much better performance than any monitor in that price range in the real world straight out of the box.

Youtubers like to compare stats on paper but they never mention the insane margins of difference a panel will have from one to another.

2 years ago at work we ordered 10 32 inch screens (from a well known brand), not 2 of them were calibrated the same out of factory.

As you have pointed out, every device has a different screen and images will look different from one to another. Mobile devices and PCs are setup to show highly saturated, high contrast images. As someone else said, “punchy” and people have gotten conditioned to want this look on their screens.

If you are only using your photography on screens, I don’t think you should bother with calibration. This is because you’re editing an image on a calibrated monitor and displaying it on a variety of other screens that are uncalibrated. It won’t look right.

However, if you are going to print your photos, calibration is critical. Printed photos do not look like the punchy screens. In this case you are calibrating your monitor to show you what the image will look like in print. Even then, there are usually tweaks you need to do to get the screen to match the final print, but starting with a calibrated monitor gets you 90% there.

This is why most pros use Macs. Most Apple screens are pretty good without any manual adjustment.

A lot of useful things have already been said here, but I think there's still something missing. Colour management has two components: calibrating devices AND profiling them so the operating system (and thus any software that uses colour management) knows what it's dealing with.

To calibrate means to adjust e.g. a monitor to match certain target values, specifically a given colour space, gamma curve and brightness. After doing this you can say "Now my monitor complies to sRGB with a brightness of 120". However, your software doesn't know that unless you create an ICM profile for your calibrated device, install it in your operating system and link it to that device. For profiling you can use the same tools you already have for calibration.

Another thing I'd like to add is that 120 brightness is "correct", but it's significantly darker than what people are used to look at. For me personally it's too dark so I'm going for a brightness of 160. That also works well if you keep in mind that physical prints will be darker than that.

Screen calibration IS ONLY useful if you are printing photos especially in a professional setting. Otherwise no need to calibrate.

Yes in general calibrated screens have yellowish tint. Edit in a neutral colored room with no color casts or reflections, load the profile that matches the paper stock and and regularly do proof prints to see if it matches exactly what you want the print to look like on paper.

IMHO, a calibrated monitor is only useful if you are printing your photos. This way you will get consistent results from your prints. Otherwise, you are just processing photos and videos on a calibrated monitor for everyone else in the world to view in uncalibrated monitors and cell phones, and the benefits are lost in translation.

I ran into this issue doing real estate photography. Sure, my monitor looks great, but my realtors and realty web sites just don't see it the same way because they are just not calibrated.

In addition to what others have said, you’ve linked two pretty low end consumer model monitors. Probably not worth calibrating for any purpose.

Pro colorists use monitors in the tens of thousands of dollars. They cost that much for a reason. It’s not brightness or product life or functionality. It’s color accuracy.

You’re bringing a $250 Amazon product to the table and expecting it to do anything even close to a $25,000 reference monitor? Not gonna happen. Plus you’re probably missing other critical intermediary hardware.

Easiest realistic solution for you, get a MacBook Pro G2 and absolutely be close enough for your use case right out of the box. How do I know this’ll be good enough for you? If if wouldn’t, you’d already know this which means you wouldn’t be asking how to perfectly calibrate a $250 gaming monitor.

Long story short you are using a game monitor for professional grade work. Think a $5,000 lens on a disposable camera and complaining about the quality.

Have you also calibrated your printer?
Seems your calibration tool is off

Again, over the next ten years I’ve repeated this process over and over. The calibrated screen just looks too bad to deal with and it makes my images that I worked so hard on, and look good on other screens, look terrible.

if you calibrate a Macbook and it looks drastically different, you've done something wrong.

What am I doing wrong? I do like to game on this same screen but I’ve always just decreased the screens default color saturation and contrast to match how the images look on my iphone, which matches Lightroom pretty closely.

who knows? there's so many steps, you don't even bother to share any of them, nor any comparisons.

Also, the uncalibrated screen I am currently using looks identical to how the raw images look in camera but the calibrated screen looks nowhere near close.

that's impossible and shows you don't understand how RAW works

If there is someone out there who wants to make some money, PM and I will pay you 50$ for your time if you can help me figure out this problem.

a professional screen calibration service cost a lot more than that.

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today in 2023 monitor calibration is NOWHERE NEAR as important as 10 year ago, almost everybody has factory calibration now, to the point where the minor difference in color of any decent quality monitor out of box, is not going to affect the quality of your photo edits.

Ive print quite often myself. Never calibrated monitor, it's a 7 year old monitor too. My images come out how they look on screen.

When you calibrate you calibrate for print. Hence it’s going to look super dull compared to the super bright and saturated images on your monitor or phone

So for gaming I’d use a different preset on your monitor.

What about the Mac photography screen setting?

So, my background is in digital visual effects and animation production for motion pictures, and I have experience with designing and implementing end-to-end color processes across entire studios.

As multiple people here have pointed out, calibrating your monitor, meaning adjusting its settings to match some standard, has to be one element of an end-to-end process to achieve anything useful.

There are a whole lot of color transformations that happen between capturing your image and putting it on paper, on film, or on a viewer's screen.

• Your camera translates a real-world intensity and combination of many wavelengths into spatial and color information that's stored in the raw file that necessarily throws away a ton of information.
• Your raw file usually contains information from the camera that defines how its data is to be mapped to some kind of display-friendly standard, and your image editing or conversion software (often Photoshop or Lightroom) reads and applies this.
• The photo editing software converts that raw image into a color space that it uses for its own internal representation.
• When it's displayed on the screen, another transformation occurs from the internal color space of the photo editing software to the output encoding space. (note: monitor calibration can, but doesn't always, result in generation of a profile that can control this step.)
• Your monitor takes images in the output color space and converts that to light intensity (note: adjusting this is a major purpose of monitor calibration.)
• Your photo editing color space also has similar transformations to the color encoding of your output device, if you are printing your images to paper or film.
• Finally, the output device itself has a transformation from its encoded space to the actual colors that end up on paper or film.

If you're not controlling (or at least using consistent settings for) these steps, you're essentially in an uncalibrated environment, where the steps you don't control can do just about anything.

Photoshop's controls for managing this process are on the View -> Proof Setup submenu, and exactly how to approach it and how to use those controls is way beyond what i can give you in a Reddit post.

But, if you're in an uncalibrated environment and want results that seem pretty much like you're used to, you probably can calibrate your monitor to sRGB, set any monitor settings to sRGB (this is at least possible on the PD2500Q) and set your proof setup settings in Photoshop to "internet standard RGB (sRGB)" Yes, there are other ways to do things, but if you're hitting only a couple of steps on the above chain, you're likely to get results that range from slightly odd to very much not what you want.