When it comes to making sure your photography is the best
it can possibly be, it's massively important that the color,
contrast and brightness of the display you're using is spot on.
But even when you think you've done everything right and you're
still not happy with the results, especially when printing for yourself
or sending to a lab, there is some good news.
It might just be that you're using the wrong cable
to connect your display to your computer.
Okay, so recently I got to spend some time with Dr.
Chris Bai a world leading authority on color,
who is also the vice chair of the ICC,
the International Color Consortium.
Chair of the Display Working Group at the ICC and also
the senior color expert and manager of the color Technology Lab
at BenQ; the folks who make the displays that I use and have relied on for years.
Now we chatted a lot about color, calibration,
printing and future technology, and it was completely fascinating.
But one thing he said that blew me away
was about using HDMI cables to connect your display and your computer
and how that can have a big impact on your images.
So I'm going to show you that part of our chat that I filmed,
which is only about 5 minutes, and then afterwards I want to show
and explain something for checking that your display is calibrated correctly.
So here's the chat, but make sure to stick around for what I show afterwards.
Something that really surprised me and I asked you
not to explain it off camera to save it.
Was the way we connect our displays to our computers.
Because when we get a bank display,
we get numerous cables that we can then use to connect it.
One of them is a HDMI. Yes.
And you seem to ...
don't use HDMI so I know you said there's a long answer for that
but what would be what would be your kind of abbreviated response to say, look,
don't use a HDMI cable when you're connecting your computer and your display.
Okay.
In HDMI,
there are actually two color formats in that HDMI.
I would just say one is called full range one and one is called limited range.
Full range as in RGB terms is like 0 to 255
right, in 8 bits terms, so 255 and that's full range.
So that is okay and that's what we want it right
we want RGB to be like 0 to 255, we want everything at that.
Right.
So full range is ok, but limited range
is they call 16 to 235.
So what you're missing is actually 0 to 15 it looks like 16
and 236 to 255 is cut
off is looking like 235. Okay.
So this is called limited range and this is done by the reason was before
the transmission like saving for the bandwidth.
Okay.
This is going back to the old days at the television and also
the bandwidth was not that broad before
so they need to save some bandwidth to save some data.
Okay.
And this case, they just cut off the the first bit and the last little bit.
So in this case, it can also increase the contrast.
So in the television, right, it looks better
because you want more contrast of your picture, depper blacks and like
more saturated colors.
That's what you want it on your television right?
Then that makes more sense on television.
So the default color format on
HDMI is the limited range.
It's not the full range.
Okay.
So not a lot of people know about this.
Okay.
Right.
Okay. But
if you do a calibration
using the limited range on the monitor, what will happen?
Well, as far as I would see that you're not getting
the true representation of the colors.
So if you're trying to print, you're never going to get a print to screen match
because you screen's not even calibrated correctly. Exactly.
And the thing is,
because the calibration software will think
the input signal of full range
right not, limited range, but in fact you're giving the limited range.
So it will try to compensate for those missing values.
So it will try to like generate those values it doesn't know.
So giving like rubbish fill in there.
So your gamma curve will look really bad in that case.
So you might get a really greenish like a gamma curve,
like grayscale might look greenish, it might look yellowish or reddish.
We don't know. Okay.
It really depends on the algorithm.
So the difference could really, really be noticeable.
Yeah.
So your calibration report will actually show that
you fail the calibration. Okay.
And you don't know why
I did the calibration, like I warmed up the monitors really fine.
I follow everything and it works.
Everything checks out. I'm just using HDMI.
Okay, but calibration fail.
Okay. It's your monitors fault.
No, it's not our monitors, our monitors are fine, it’s
the calibration, it’s the cable, it’s the HDMI cable.
So that that obviously begs the question
then what would you say would be the the best way to connect?
The best way to connect nowadays, I would say
probably a usb-c cable or
displayport cable, dp cable.
These two will be the best choice.
These two gives out the best color formats for the calibration.
That is so, when you when you explain it that way of how much of a difference
it can make I think why haven't why don't we know this? Yes.
Why isn't that public knowledge?
It's just crazy.
People never actually really think about it and actually they
when they actually encounter a failed
calibration report,
they just pick up a phone and call us and say, your monitor is broken.
They never think about is the HDMI fault.
Wow. Yeah. Okay.
So you would have heard there that Dr.
Chris Bai mentioned about getting a failed display calibration.
Now, not a lot of people do the validation after they've calibrated their display,
but it is a really important part of the process.
When I calibrate my BenQ displays using BenQ’s palette master
element software, the validation is here at the end of the process.
Now there are two numbers that you need to pay particular attention to.
This symbol means Delta E and basically gives you
an idea of how your display is performing.
A Delta E number of 2 or less is fantastic, and a Delta
E of 5 or less is really good.
The validation process takes just a few moments,
and you can see here that my display has passed with flying colors.
If you use other software to calibrate display, such as Calibrite,
then you can also perform a validation at the end.
Now, the display I use for editing my images is the BenQ SW321C
and like all BenQ displays, this is a hardware calibrated display,
meaning that the profile created
is held on a chip within the display, which is something else
that ensures accuracy of color, contrast and brightness.
Now there is a lot more that Dr.
Chris Bai and I talked about and I will be sharing that in future videos,
but I am really excited about the big impact what we did go
through is going to have on my future and long awaited printing course.
If you want to keep up with the progress on that,
I've added a link to my email group in the description of this video
and it's also that group that I give special discount codes
to when new full length tutorials are released.
Right, that's all for me for this video so if it's been useful in any way, click
on that thumb to give us a like, subscribe and I'll catch you in the next video.