ATI Graphics Card? Wave goodbye to Adobe gamma!

IS
Posted By
Ian_Stickland
Apr 10, 2004
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573
Replies
12
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Closed
It seems that by design, ATI have removed the functionality that Adobe gamma uses to adjust the on screen gamma of ATI cards. This has been since ATI’s Catalyst 4.2 and later drivers, see this link:

<http://www.ati.com/support/infobase/4501.html>

Seems other calibration software may suffer also…

Feel free to let ATI know what you think. I for one am not impressed and would not buy another ATI based card if this is how they want to treat photographers.

Do Adobe have any kind of view on this and how this affects their gamma utility?

Ian.
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ati card gamma graphics

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brent_bertram
Apr 10, 2004
Ian,
We’ll hope there’s a work-around , if it becomes necessary . I just checked my ATI driver ( a relatively new card for me ), and it’s 8 versions old . I don’t see a reason to update it, so "sitting tight" is my new motto <G> . I also have a perfectly good Matrox G400 card in the drawer ( but not 8x AGP ) that has worked for several years and can be put into service again.

As this issue develops, I suspect we’ll see workaround solutions from either ATI or Adobe or both. The Adobe Gamma Utility needs to be revised for LCD’s , if possible, anyway.

🙂

Brent
BC
Bill Crocker
Apr 10, 2004
ATI could probably care less! They’re make more money off the gamer industry. Sell 3D cards for $500.00/ea, by the truck loads! Besides, their current generation cards, and drivers, do nothing for photographers anyway. They’re designed, and optimized for 3D, and motion.

Bill Crocker

wrote in message
It seems that by design, ATI have removed the functionality that Adobe
gamma uses to adjust the on screen gamma of ATI cards. This has been since ATI’s Catalyst 4.2 and later drivers, see this link:
<http://www.ati.com/support/infobase/4501.html>

Seems other calibration software may suffer also…

Feel free to let ATI know what you think. I for one am not impressed and
would not buy another ATI based card if this is how they want to treat photographers.
Do Adobe have any kind of view on this and how this affects their gamma
utility?
Ian.
LP
Luis_Puncel
Apr 10, 2004
I have a couple of questions:

1) How does one know what version of Catalyst drivers they have? I have an ATI card, and when I look at the display drivers in the hardware device manager, there are all kinds of drivers with different version numbers, but none of them are identified as "catalyst drivers".

2) If it does turn out that I have installed version 4.2 or higher can I calibrate the monitor using ATI’s calibration tool? Is there some inherent reason why ATI’s calibration software would not do as good a job as Adobe Gamma? Or is it that Photoshop Elements would ignore ATI’s calibration settings when loading?

Thanks,

Luis
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brent_bertram
Apr 10, 2004
Luis,
My take on the issue is that Adobe Gamma does two things . It helps you calibrate your display and balance the colors, then it creates a monitor profile, with a section that is loaded into the video LUT on startup, to offset the display to the calibrated state.

That monitor profile is also used in the actual display during the Elements or Photoshop session. I think our fear is that the ATI driver won’t allow the gamma loader.exe to change the video LUT , and that the ATI driver won’t perform the same functions itself. I’m thinking of experimenting with it myself ( human guinea pig ) and see what I think of the 4.3 catalyst driver .

If you go to ATI’s website, you can see all the older drivers, and relate the funny numbering scheme they have to your driver. You’d never be able to relate the numbers without their table, I’m sure. I’m running version 3.6, I believe it is.

🙂

Brent
IS
Ian_Stickland
Apr 10, 2004
I tried the 4.3 Catalyst drivers as I had another problem that the website in question said was due to a driver issue… However after updating I ran Adobe Gamma to make sure the settings were OK, and noticed that when you get to the grey box with the slider that nothing happened…

I went to look on rage3d.com (a reasonable source of ATI info) and found that loads of other people had noticed this as well… so I went back to the 4.1 catalyst drivers as these worked.

When the 4.4 drivers were released I looked through the release notes to see if it had been fixed and saw the reference to the web page above…

Now, I guess I could use the ATI Panel but it simply shows a slider and no way to gauge if you’ve got the correct setting. One of the things I’ve been toying with is a ‘cheap’ monitor profiler as getting the right on-screen colour to print output is quite fiddly. My fear now is that such systems use similar way of adjusting on-screen gamma to Adobe’s utility and that they too will be broken.

For my ATI card which is quite old now, using the 4.1 driver isn’t a major issue (although it’s an AIW so updates to MMC are always useful and sometime require a minimum level of catalyst driver) but I was contemplating getting a better AIW card. With a new card the newer drivers are more likely to include both bug fixes and enhancements so for me this is a real problem.

Seems ATI are only interested in gamers and are forgetting about equally large user bases.

I’d be very interested if Adobe developers knew about ATI’s direction and whether ATI will provide a different way for 3rd party applications to calibrate and adjust display gamma… if they have then I suspect it’s a matter of time before other utilities catch up. If they haven’t it begs the question does this break Microsoft’s driver rules for video cards?? IF all video cards start supporting such basic configuration settings in proprietory ways how is any calibration utility supposed to work??

Ian.
D
davee
Apr 11, 2004
I was thinking of ordering a new PC with an ATI AIW card but now I’m put off, because PS gamma is a great help in getting a CRT display that is reasonably close to photo prints.
I currently have an ATI AIW with Radeon 4.1 drivers (I think – see below), and the gamma works.

But now I’m wondering about the GE Force 5200 with TV tuner. The problem there is that there have a few negative reports of the TV facilities. Does anyone here know if PS gamma is OK with GE Force video cards? This is more important than the TV.

There is just one point about the ATI AIW cards, the TV MMC facilities do not seem to be connected to the video drivers (not on my card anyway), so it may be possible to use the 4.1 drivers with later TV/MMC facilities. But I’m not sure I’d risk this with a brand new card….

Regarding which driver do you have, I guess that the numbering is 4.xy.zzzz where x is the ‘family’ and y is the ‘version’ zzzz the release. I have a mix of 4.12.zzzz and 4.13.zzzz modules (plus MMC 7.7 and teletext 2.12). Do a windows Search for files/folders named ati*.exe then RIGHT click any of the results then Properties then the Version tab and you’ll see what you’ve got. I don’t guarantee this but it may be correct.
D
davee
Apr 11, 2004
One other point. On Iiyama CRT monitors I’ve seen it is possible to adjust the colors using the buttons on the device. The color temperature has presets of 5000, 6500, and 9300 plus a User setting which allows the R and B components to be changed. This together with the contrast and brightness might do the same job as Adobe Gamma, providing a suitable image is on the screen, thus dealing with the ATI problem. I would guess most reasonable CRTs would have similar facilities.
SS
Susan_S.
Apr 12, 2004
While that’s OK for getting the screen image to look OK if all you want to do is examine images, it doesn’t (as far as I know) create a matching color profile – and the Adobe apps which are fully colour managed need to have a display color profile – color callibration is more than making the screen look right – it’s also telling the applications what thescreen looks like so that they can correctly translate the images that you open into colours on the screen.
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brent_bertram
Apr 12, 2004
dave milbut "ATI Catalyst drivers and Adobe Gamma" 4/12/04 5:28am </cgi-bin/webx?13/8>
is a similiar thread on the Photoshop forum.

I tried the 4.3 catalyst driver and it messed up Monaco Gamma also. The driver interferes with loading the video LUT by an outside program apparently. I re-installed my older drivers and all is well.

🙁

Brent
DN
DS_Nelson
Apr 12, 2004
I’d be very interested if Adobe developers knew about ATI’s direction

It doesn’t look like it. See Chris Cox’s comment in the Photoshop thread that Brent mentioned above (you’ll have to click "show all messages"). Chris is one of the Photoshop programmers.
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brent_bertram
Apr 16, 2004
Patch released by ATI, no one knows yet how well it works ! <G> <http://www.ati.com/support/infobase/4501.html>

🙂

Brent
D
davee
May 27, 2004
Has anyone with an ATI card tried Adobe Gamma with the ATI patch for its latest Catalyst drivers (see previous post) yet?

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