Gamma 2.2

[Jarred Land]

Hey all, Just a reminder (in the mac world) to set your monitors to 2.2 gamma.

I just got a new system over the weekend and for a brief moment was wondering why everything looked like crap.. then remembered and changed it.

Just a reminder, since new macs ( at least the new mac pro towers) still come with 1.8 gamma as default, hopefully some day that will change.

[Justin Kirchhoff]

Just curious Jarred, what new system did you get? Specs?

[A. Bastaki]

how do you configure that on windows? ive got the 256mb standard video card. im running winx64 on mac pro. nvidia standard card. are there any gamma 2.2 icc profiles i could load?

googling at the moment.. ill upload as soon as i could find one.

so far it seems like windows already are gamma 2.2 calibrated
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Alaska Dispensary

[Chris Kenny]

The catch is that Final Cut Pro assumes your monitor is set to 1.8 and displays video supposedly corrected for that. See here.

[jbeale]

Most PC displays are somewhat close to 2.2 gamma to start with, it's just the Mac world that has traditionally been (and apparently still is) 1.8.

Here's a test chart you can use to tell what gamma your monitor is:
http://www.normankoren.com/makingfin...tml#gammachart

Note that quite often, a different application may do its own gamma correction! An image displayed in Photoshop often looks different than the same image displayed in my Firefox web browser. Download the test image from the link above, try it and see.

Note also, sometimes people say the gamma is off when actually it's the black level that is set wrong- both of those affect how contrasty or washed-out the image looks. The chart above lets you check both.

[Jarred Land]

Just curious Jarred, what new system did you get? Specs?

I bought one of the new 2008 Mac Pro towers for home. 3.0ghz x8-cores with 8gb memory. I put a 160gb 10,000rpm Raptor as boot drive and it sure makes a difference over the stock drive apple gives you.

I also ordered 3 500gb drives from newegg to put in the internal drive caddy in a raid0 config to handle day to day render large video files.

Im experimenting using Idisk to sync my desktop and AAsync to make my little lacie sync via the internet on my work system so i dont need to haul around little drives anymore.. so far it works pretty good...

[Jarred Land]

The catch is that Final Cut Pro assumes your monitor is set to 1.8 and displays video supposedly corrected for that. See here.

yeah.. wouldn't it be great if that actually worked :)

Quicktime has a gamma box that is supposed to overide the 1.8 gamma overide, but that as well, doesnt always work, and only works for people that have studio 2 installed.

[Blair S. Paulsen]

Thanks Chris & jbeale for the references. The Apple article looks like something I will be printing out and keeping right by my Mac.

I have often been critical of using computer monitors for judging video, perhaps with better set up I can close that gap for those times when a proper video monitor is not available. I still think the toe will be represented very differently but its a step in the right direction. Sorry about the pun.

[Jarred Land]

Blair before you get too excited and make that document your bible, remember that that article was written almost 4 years ago.

still some good info in it, but alot has changed since then.

[Anders Holck]

Wouldn't the only correct handeling of this be that all software would either render through colorsync or check the gamma setting of the current screen profile.

Just assuming something always seems to be a bad thing :-)