If you have two monitors on one card, you can only have one profile. That’s a Windows issue. If you have two cards, you can have two seperate profiles. The profile goes with the card. I’ve been using two cards and individually profiled monitors for awhile now.
Looks like I may have found the answer. If you go to Color MSettings and select the sRGB working space drop down somewhere near the top will be a "Monitor RGB – xxx" where xxx is the name of the monitor profile. That will tell you what profile PS CS2 is using. It seems that irregardless of how many video cards or monitors you have PS CS will use the primary display’s ICC profile for color management. Seems odd that every other app I have (Bibble, C1, Breeze Browser, even Canon’s freebie DPP) allow you to force a monitor profile to use for color management, but PS CS2 does not. Hope they fix that in PS CS3 !! So it looks like I’ll have to reconfigure whihc of my monitors is the primary.
Your message sounds confusing. You *could* use a monitor profile as your RGB working space, but you wouldn’t want to. I think you’re mixing up monitor profile with working space. Photoshop is supposed to look to your main monitor profile, and translate colour spaces through that, which is why a properly calibrated monitor is important. Your monitor profile must be correct for Photoshop to display colours accurately no matter which RGB working space you are using.
I’m not mixing up working space with monitor profiles. My understanding is PS is supposed to utilize the montor profile to adject how it deisplays colors in your working space to accomidate limitations in the display device as it will be usually more limited than the working space. Well if i am displaying my images ont he secoandary monitor and PS is only looking ta the primary monitor’s profile to detemrine those limitations that can be a problme, especially since I use a lesser quality 19" LCD as my primary and then us a high quality 20" LCD as my secondary monitor to view all the images on. In all my RAW applications it has the ability for me to tell that applciationt he specific profile to use so they don’t have issues, but i have always wondered why images look slightly different when I bring them in to PS. Well I think I know now, becasue PS is looking at my crappy 19" LCD profile instead of the profile for the LCD it is actually dispalying on.
If you have two monitors on one card, you can only have one profile.
Not necessarily true. Many dual head cards are seen by Windows as two individual devices. I’ve got a ATI card that came with my Dell. A check of the device manager shows two devices.
Both monitors have their own profiles.
Bob
Bob,
What card are you using? I went through this discussion with the tech guys at ATI ( the Fire GL people are great ) and they never suggested a single card that would display two different profiles on a Window’s based machine. They told me that I needed two individual cards and even specified the motherboard because I needed two full-time x16 xpress slots.
This was also confirmed by the tech people at Monaco.
My experience with a single card was that in the settings it appeared as though it was using two different profiles, but it was actually only using the profile of the primary monitor.
It’s a Radeon X300 SE. Standard Dell issue.
One DVI and one VGA. It shows as two cards in the device manager and both have monitors are calibrated with separate profiles. Easy to check in the color management section of the display properies.
Bob
Yes, I know in the properties, it will look like you have two profiles, but I think Windows is only using the profile of the monitor that you specify as primary. I ran into this trying to use an X800 with DVI and VGA out. Because I’m running a CRT and LCD, the profiles are very different. If I switched primary display, I would notice my profile change. So I checked with the Monaco guys and they told me I couldn’t run two profiles on one card. I am now using two Fire GL cards and everything is working the way it’s supposed to.
On my main Photoshop machine, I have Xp x64 (64 bit). Two LaCie 321 monitors use two seperate profiles on my ATI dual-head card (two DVI outputs) So if your card looks like two cards in Device Manager, it should have two LUT’s.
(I know this because when booting up, I get a message saying that it’s loading the default monitor profile, and I get it twice, one for each monitor.) If I go into Display Properties, on the Advanced tab, each monitor shows it using the correct profile. this is a PCI-E card, so perhaps it’s super advanced?
On 32 bit XP, I also have a dual-head card (two LUT’s, one analog out and one DVI, and an adapter to use a CRT as the second monitor) and although there are no messages annoucning anything, each monitor shows its own profile in the Advanced tab. And they work. The colors are as close as can be expected between a LaCie Electon Blue and an old generic View Mate cheapo.
So if you have two cards, with two seperate LUT’s, I suppose Windows should see each one seperately.
There are cards with two outputs that don’t have two LUT’s, and they show up as one card in Device Manager. They can only use one profile for all monitors connected to them.
Dana,
Please give me the model number of your dual head (DVI output) ATI video card. I just received my new computer and would like to upgrade from the built-in single video display capability. I’m also new to PSCS2 and intend to use two monitors.
Kindest regards,
Carl English
