I just bought a shiny new wide gamut monitor (Dell U2713H) to replace an older TN monitor that went *zzz poof* recently. I also bought a Spyder Capture Pro color calibration kit, which includdes a Spyder 4 and the Spyder 4 Elite software. Went through the process of calibrating my fancy schmancy new monitor. After many attempts using all kinds of different settings, I came up with a profile that gave me 100%+ Adobe RGB coverage, a Gamma curve of 2.2 and a max DeltaE of 1.8, all of which are better than the factory-calibrated Adobe RGB mode. Woohoo! Yay me!
So I saved this profile and put it in use. I know it's in effect, because there's a noticeable color shift when I choose "Calibration On" in the Spyder toolbar utility.
Meanwhile, I have a much older generic 24" LCD monitor that I use as a second screen. It's calibrated (also using Spyder 4 Elite) to 99% sRGB.
So when I edit a photo in Lightroom, I run the Develop module on the wide-gamut monitor, and check up-close detail work with the generic monitor. But while doing this, I noticed that the photo looks NOTHING ALIKE on each monitor. The colors are way off!!! Just to be sure, I set the Develop module to soft-proof in sRGB. This caused no change whatsoever on either screen, other than making my background white in the develop module. The colors are still nothing alike on each screen.
A pretty good representation of what I'm seeing:
If I export the photo to a sRGB JPG, I get more bizarre results. Viewing the photo in Firefox (which is a color-managed application), the photo looks like it did on the generic monitor in Lightroom (more saturated, less green). This is true on BOTH screens, so I know the 2 screens are calibrated. Viewing the photo in Picasa photo viewer, it looks the same way it did on the wide-gamut monitor in the Develop module (less saturated, more green). Again, this is true no matter which monitor I move it to. Remember this is a JPG with the sRGB profile tagged. It should render as sRGB regardless of whether the application viewing it is color-managed or not. But I DO have Picasa and Firefox set to color manage, so wth?
A good representation of what I'm seeing (Picasa on left, Firefox on right):
Since both screens were calibrated using the same software and same device on the same day, shouldn't they at least attempt to display somewhat similar colors, even if the generic monitor can't do all the same shades as the wide-gamut monitor? Or is there some issue with using different monitors with different gamuts when running Lightroom on 2 screens?
And why is the photo showing up differently in different viewers when it's clearly tagged?
This color management stuff is giving me a headache...