Appearance of color in Photoshop after calibration, and outside of Photoshop

Question

I bought an expensive monitor some time ago which claims to produce the color gamut of Adobe RGB, the NEC PA271W. I also bought an X-rite i1 Display Pro colorimeter, with software, to calibrate my monitor.
After calibration, the images appear right when displayed in Photoshop, and such images print okay on my professional printer with professional profiles, but such images don't appear okay outside of Photoshop, when displayed on my calibrated monitor. They appear far too saturated and contrasty.
When I check what profile is listed under the Color Management tab of my monitor, the default profile is the same as that listed among all the other profiles under Windows/system32/spool/drivers/color.
What's going on, I wonder. Is my video card not compatible with the X-rite calibration process? The video card is the AMD Radeon HD 7700 Series.
Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

Vincent RJ wrote:
I think we're either talking at cross purposes, or you are misinterpreting my words. I've always understood that the purpose of calibration is to standardise the appearance of the image on all monitors that are correctly calibrated.
You are indeed MASSIVELY WRONG there.  Trust me, you're not even close to beginning to understand color management. What you are describing is a simplistic, deficient personal idea of Color Management, not "calibration".
STEP ONE in Color Management:
Calibrating and profiling are only a start of the whole Color Management process.  Calibrating and profiling your monitor does nothing, absolutely nothing for the appearance of any image on other monitors.  Trust me:  ZILCH !
When you leave out the term "profiling" and refer to calibration alone you are talking sheer nonsense.  Get yourself into the habit of thinking of both terms together, though they are part of the one starting point in process.
STEP TWO:
Set your saved monitor profile after calibration as your Monitor Profile File only.  Never as your Working Space, never as something you ever embed in a file, never as a print or target profile.
Once you have set this profile as your Monitor Profile.  You NEVER think of it again, and never mention it again—unless eventually, and for whatever reason, your monitor profile file gets corrupted, damaged or disappears by magic.
Note that your monitor profile is a strictly device-dependent profile, it applies to nothing else in the entire world, only to your video card and your particular monitor unit.  Not even to an identical model and manufacturing batch.  Each individual monitor has its own performance characteristics (industrial tolerances of components or manufacture and all that, as well as aging of same).
STEP THREE:
This entails choosing your WORKING COLOR SPACE.  This will always be a device-independent (repeat: device-independent) standard workspace such as ProPhoto RGB, Adobe RGB, sRGB, etc., in descending degree of gamut width.
STEP FOUR:
You make absolutely sure to embed the device-independent Color Profile of your Working Color Space in your document (image file), this is called tagging your file.  This is of such enormous importance that I always say:  "If a moron hands you an untagged file, you're going to have to guess in which color space it was created.  Once you make your best educated guess, remember to go beat that moron who gave you an untagged file mercilessly with a baseball bat or simlar, heavy object!"
This is just my way of stressing how wrong it is not to embed the color space profile in your finished file. The only worse offense would be to tag it with the wrong profile.  Tagging a file with your monitor profile should be punished by quartering or by burning at the stake.
Again, just strong imagery to reinforce the concept.
STEP FIVE:
This will be using a device-dependent Printing Profile, also called a Target Profile, in the printing dialog of the Photoshop application or the RIP used by a commercial printing outfit.  This will be a device dependent profile prepared exclusively and specifically for your particular combination of ink, paper and printer.
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Vincent RJ wrote:
…I'm not referring to any conversion of numbers or RGB values…
But of course you are Vincent RJ, you are!!!  Most definitely you are!  Why can't you grasp that basic concept? ?? !!
With a calibrated and profiled monitor and a properly tagged image file (with the color profile of your working color space properly embedded) Photoshop will use your Monitor Profile that you set in the application as such to CONVERT and CHANGE THE NUMBERS (VALUES) of the RGB colors in your finished image BEFORE sending them to your monitor.  Every single time.  Think of that process as making up for the deficiencies of your monitor and video card combination.
When other people look at your image, if they're using a color managed application, said application will use whatever they have set as their Monitor Profile in their setup to CHANGE THE NUMBERS of the colors in your finished image BEFORE sending them to THEIR monitors.
If their monitors are uncalibrated and unprofiled, you don't have a prayer of a chance to control even remotely how your image will look on their screens.  That's 96% of web users, by the way. If their monitors are calibrated and profiled, the image on the screen will be reasonably close to what you see, but the gamut of their monitors (vs. your wide-gamut NEC) will necessarily change the RGB numbers and colors from what your setup does, and the variance will be greater.
Get rid forever of your silly concept of "standardisation" or standardization, whichever way we want to spell it.  That is simply a pipe dream of yours.  If you have a big stick handy, beat up the moron who got you to believe that.  Use twice the numbers of strikes if that person is a teacher.
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Lastly, I'm getting an uneasy feeling because you haven't mentioned printing at all.
You should be aware that Color Management is defined in terms of the art and science of controlling colors from the digital image to print.  There are different variants of the definition, but they all end with the word PRINT.
What I'm trying to say is that a person who works with images only to be observed and shown on screens does not need to bother with Color Management at all, because the minute percentage of monitor viewers I mentioned above.  Such a person can just set everything to sRGB (monitor, color space, tags, printer, etc), the lowest common denominator of profiles, and forget about anything else.
I would hope I got through to you, but I'm not holding my breath.
I wish you luck in your endeavo(u)rs.