# My first CalMAN calibration - Concerns about CMS



## vbs (Sep 11, 2013)

I am totally new to video calibration and just did my first calibration. I googled a lot and read a lot of stuff before starting and video calibration turned out to be quite a complex topic. I am very glad to have found this forum cause it is by far the best resource for information I could find so far!

I have a Samsung UE55ES7090 and an X-Rite i1Display Pro. I used CalMAN 4.6.5 to do it. I dont have any experience at all on this yet but in general it went quite well I think. The only trouble I had was on the CMS page though and I was hoping to get some hints from you guys here 

I tried to follow the CalMAN guidance as closely as possible on the CMS page (well, on the other pages too...) and I could get the luminance of the primaries (and also secondaries) quite close to zero. I am a bit concerned about my calibration regarding hue and color for red and blue though cause they are exceeding the green area.

The problem is: whatever I try I am unable to improve hue and color any better for red and blue. I am using the RGB controls of the TV for the individual colors. For red I have currently 53/1/0 and for blue I have 0/7/51.

What do you guys think about my deltas? I never saw another calibration result so I really have no comparison. Is it normal not to be able to get some colors really correct (like my red and blue)?
Or do you have maybe some hints what I could try to further improve things? I already tried the other control (like color, tint, skin-color) but it did not help either.

However I am able (for example) to improve the hue of red by increasing the green component to like 2 or 3. It also increases luminance then of course which I can compensate by decreasing the red component then. The result is a quite orange/yellowish looking red which looks incorrect for me. 

Big thanks in advance guys! I really appreciate your input!

EDIT:
I hopefully managed to attach my CMS result now


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## michael tlv (Jun 23, 2009)

Greetings

Of course how well you end up is also a function of the tools that you use and how sound your foundation is for all things calibration related.

There are no perfect TVs and when you use imperfect tools on these tvs ... there is the theoretical ... and then there is reality. A whole bag of compromises ... which are more easily made if you have a sound foundation.

(Like trying to help a person with division and multiplication problems and you find out that the person doesn't know how to add or subtract very well. Unfortunately.  )

You are on the DIY path ... got your own hardware and software ... now you find out that having hardware and software is still not the same thing as actually knowing how to calibrate. (Sort of like how hammers don't teach you how to build a house.)

So you have to either teach yourself how to actually calibrate ... or you get real training of some sort. Sorry to say.

If you feel you have a good understanding of how to calibrate, please take this quiz and tell us how you scored.


Regards


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## vbs (Sep 11, 2013)

Ok, I got your message since it was quite clear, sorry for bothering. I was under the impression that this place is also meant for newbies to get some hints from people that have some experience on the matter.

I got a degree in computer science specialized on image/video/audio processing and in the past few days I have read pretty much every article I could find regarding this calibration topic. I do not feel (and I never claimed) to have a good understanding of video calibration. I took your quiz (out of curiosity) and I had about 42%.


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## michael tlv (Jun 23, 2009)

Greetings

Help is always available. The nature of the quiz is to determine the level of your knowledge ... your foundation. 42% ... that's weak. The problem with a weak foundation is that you may not understand the full context of the answer that is provided. (Again, like the person that can't add and subtract, but only wants help with multiplication and division problems. He can never understand the solution unless he beefs up the foundation. )

Of course professional training to improve your foundation is available and it starts at a cost of $100 ... for more than 7 hours of training. All the questions you have and more would be answered there. And you can ask the instructor even more questions after that too.

Don't want to spend $100 for the training? Spend $10 on the CMS training video in that same series. Don't want to spend $10 ...? Then you have announced that any time anyone here spends with you to help you is worth less than $10 no matter the level of assistance.  


The answer to your question is that you should be looking at dE 94 error numbers to figure out what you should do next. The brightness/saturation/hue dE numbers do not have the same weighting/importance. Some things are way more important than others. Add to that, just because a TV has a control does not mean that the control will work correctly. The last thing one does in the process is look at demo material. If people don't look right, then your graphs lie to you so you have to fix it so that people look like people.

Regards


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## vbs (Sep 11, 2013)

michael tlv said:


> Don't want to spend $100 for the training? Spend $10 on the CMS training video in that same series. Don't want to spend $10 ...? Then you have announced that any time anyone here spends with you to help you is worth less than $10 no matter the level of assistance.


I have read quite some articles on the topic but I think now its time to see how things work in real life. When actually doing things yourself then questions arise that possibly were not exactly covered in the tutorials. Thats the point where I try to find someone I can ask those specific questions.



michael tlv said:


> The brightness/saturation/hue dE numbers do not have the same weighting/importance. Some things are way more important than others.


Yeah thats also what the Calman help says explicitly on the CMS page. They say that luminance is critical for the primaries and hue is ciritical for the secondaries. I tried to follow that but still tried to optimize hue and color for the primaries while still keeping luminance intact.

Please let me ask one last question:
When you look at the CMS image above, do you think it is possible to futher improve hue/saturation of red and blue if you know which controls to touch? Or is it just normal that maybe you cant get better at this point due to limitations of the TV and/or the meter? Thanks.


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## mechman (Feb 8, 2007)

vbs said:


> Please let me ask one last question:
> When you look at the CMS image above, do you think it is possible to futher improve hue/saturation of red and blue if you know which controls to touch? Or is it just normal that maybe you cant get better at this point due to limitations of the TV and/or the meter? Thanks.


Sometimes the controls won't do what you need them to and you just have to settle for what's best. If you had full CMS controls, you could probably get them better. But you may not be able to tell the difference anyways. What controls do you have for CMS? I don't think it looks that bad for a first time calibration. 

Have you thought about going farther? Check out Michael's videos. They're a *bargain* at $100 for diy calibration!


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## michael tlv (Jun 23, 2009)

Greetings

Brightness errors are tops for all colors ...

Then Hue is most important for secondaries ...

And saturation is #2 for primaries. We are not sensitive to absolute color like red green and blue. Short of a red that looks too orange or too purple, it looks red to us. We can't tell if it is fire engine red or coke red or some other red. A better understanding of how the dE system works would help. There is a reason some of this is beyond human perception. When you get to a point where the eyes stop seeing any difference ... and you grind away to get a better graph ... it is no longer about getting the best picture possible. It is about pieces of paper.

regards


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## vbs (Sep 11, 2013)

mechman said:


> Sometimes the controls won't do what you need them to and you just have to settle for what's best. If you had full CMS controls, you could probably get them better. But you may not be able to tell the difference anyways. What controls do you have for CMS? I don't think it looks that bad for a first time calibration.


I dont know exactly what other TVs offer regarding CMS but I can control red, green and blue values for the primary and secondary colors (red, green, blue, cyan, magenta, yellow). I really tried everything (I was personally able to) but I do not get it really accurate. I guess a professional would know how to get it better or how to deal with it but for me I think thats all I can get.

At Michael:
Thanks for that round up! I will give my TV another try obeying your hints to find a better tradeoff at least. And yeah I guess you are right: I feel quite prone to optimizing the graphs just for the sake of it :yikes:

Again big thanks for the evaluation guys, helped a bunch! If you say I wont be able to tell the difference anyway I guess I will just start being happy with it which was the goal in the first place anyway


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## lcaillo (May 2, 2006)

A lot of the learning process is about figuring out what trade offs occur in your own set. Change one variable at a time and see how it affects the others. Then combinations that you think might give you the best trade off. Always use the 50% rule and go half as far as you calculate you need to and recheck. That way you don't overshoot and you see the interactions between controls.


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## JimP (May 18, 2006)

vbs

Starting off with what may be the most obvious, is your i1displaypro the current model i1display3 with an additional calibration file?

Reason for asking is that some of the older model i1displays would read red wrong after only a few years whether or not they got used.

Then you have the whole issue about accuracy of correction tables as they relate to your specific display. I got beat up pretty good the other day about how a correction table based on one manufacturer may not necessarily work well for a display made by another. Without a lot more information, I can't say how true their premise is.

In any event, sometimes the best you can hope for is to get it close enough that you're not seeing obvious errors such as yellow or green faces on everyone.


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## vbs (Sep 11, 2013)

Hm, the meter is not that old. Maybe like 2 months. The full name from Amazon is "X-Rite EODIS3 i1Display Pro". So I guess its the current model? But I dont know about an additional calibration file. There should be one? I just googled for it but could not find anything either :/

EDIT:
Well I found something regarding that calibration file. There seems to be the devices "i1 Pro", "i3" and "i3 Pro" which seem to be basically the same. Also there are Retail and OEM version :/ Those guys at X-Rite do really confuse me... As far as I know now the calibration file is for HFCR and needs to be converted for Calman...


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