Color / Monitor Calibration on 10.4.11

Hello !
I have always used Adobe RGB to visually calibrate my HP ev19w monitor. The colors seemed to be OK and the whites were always very "clean" as I have only been working with monochrome images + have Adobe RGB as the workspace setting for Photoshop CS2.
I have an Ati Mac edition 9600 graphics card and am running on OSX Tiger 10.4.11.
I have now purchased a printer which was bundled with a HP Colorimeter (aka : Eye One Display 2) + I have downloaded + installed the latest driver. I have had several attempts using the device to calibrate my monitor - I cannot seem to get "clean whites" they seem to have an off-white / yellowish cast ? ....
I am "totally clueless as to why" ? I cannot seem to get clean whites on my "calibrated monitor" !!!
Any kind advice and expertise would be most appreciated ...
Thank you in advance

If I calibrate my monitor...
You don't mention how you're doing that, and it makes a very big difference. If you mean the Calibrate function in the System Preferences, then it's a crap shoot. That function assumes your monitor is set to a 6500K white point and a 2.2 gamma, which is its starting point. That's the only way it has of even having a chance of guessing what you monitor looks like when you're done using Calibrate. And that's all it is, a guess. It can't account for how accurate your monitor presets are, the aging of the monitor colorants or drift. If color is critical, you must use a hardware/software solution to get a monitor profile that means anything.
...how do I then handle my digital photos when working w/ Photoshop.
It's up to you. What Photoshop does is open and convert your images (if necessary) to the working color space. It passes that information off to ColorSync, which then translates it to your monitor profile. So no matter what the working space is, the color you end up viewing is your monitor's color space. Here's where you have to decide what to do in Photoshop.
1) I use a wide gamut monitor, which LaCie says is 95% of Adobe RGB. According to a 3D profile mapping viewer I have, when I view one color space over the other, that's pretty accurate. I much prefer to use my monitor profile as my working RGB space. Then I absolutely know the color I'm viewing is not being clipped off. Everything is pulled into the color space I'm viewing. Why is this important? Say you shot something that was a very hot pink. That color may be in the range of Adobe RGB, but not your monitor. Your monitor space just clips that pink to the closest pink it can display. Now you get a new monitor with a better color range. That same image will look very saturated compared to your old monitor. And not just pinks, anything that Adobe RGB was carrying your old monitor couldn't display. People's faces may be glowing pinkish red, where they weren't before. Had you used your previous monitor's profile as your working space, it could be converted to the new monitor's space in Photoshop. The end result would be that you would hardly see any difference at all. I won't use a color space that my monitor can't represent. You're working blind in reference to color your viewing as opposed to what the file actually has in it.
2) Use a large color space such as Adobe RGB regardless of your monitor's ability to display it. Advantage? You're not throwing any color out that your camera captured. Personally, I don't care. The color I can view is already incredibly saturated. Far more than any printer or even photographic paper can reproduce. What I may lose isn't anything to lose sleep over. Disadvantage? Some of what you're seeing. The embedded profile is NOT what you're viewing. When you send to the printer, it's sending color data based on the working color space, not your monitor's space. How you've calibrated your monitor (white point, gamma, luminance, etc.) can result in the printed output being a little different to a lot.
So there's give and take. Use your monitor profile as your working space and give up some of the original camera data, or work in a color space that is converted to your monitor's space and hold the original color data.
I like what I see on the monitor but sometimes I hate what I see coming off my printer.
I'm not sure if you mean colors are actually visually off (like greens print much redder than what you're viewing), or colors are generally accurate, but some are very dull compared to the monitor.
If the former, an inaccurate monitor profile is the most likely cause. Though it can also be using the wrong printer profile for the paper being used. Even if you have the right printer profile, it's a profile based on the printer (even though it's the same model) they used to create it. Your printer's print head is likely not laying down ink in exactly the same manner (which is nothing unusual).
If the latter, there's just a lot of color in RGB that cannot in any way be reproduced by fixed hue colorants on paper. Generally, the more saturated, wowwy zowwy color on screen, the less likely you'll get that on any kind of paper.

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  • What exactly does monitor calibration do?

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    Profiling is first checking and then describing the display characteristics of the monitor in a monitor profile file. A monitor profile file, among other things, describes how the monitor displays color values like the RGB numbers. Profiling doesn't change the monitor behavior. The profile file is used by the color managed programs to change the color appearance of the images they use by sending the appropriate color values to the video card. These color values may be different from the actual color values of the image.
    On theory, you don't need calibration in order to have properly characterized monitor. All the color managed programs need, is a monitor profile that describes how the monitor displays color values. However on practice if the monitor is calibrated as much as possible to a desired state, it can have much more and better display capabilities than a monitor without calibration. A desired state of a monitor is when its full capabilities can be used with certain display targets. These targets are specified by the user and are usually the white and black points, color temperature, and gamma.
    To illustrate how a monitor without calibration can be a problem, I will give the following example. If you reduce only one of the RGB signals significantly, lets say the Blue, by using the hardware controls of the monitor then all neutral colors will become yellowish. With such monitor display, to get neutral colors, the color managed programs have to reduce also the other two signals Red and Green using the video card to the lowest denominator of the reduced Blue and this in general will limit the range of the entire color space available on your monitor. And since color management is about simulating on your monitor other color spaces (device and non-device specific) if you have limited display capabilities your monitor will not be able to adequately simulate other color spaces no matter how well the color managed programs try to achieve that. And also, as you already guessed that, in this example the non-color managed programs will display everything yellowish on such monitor because they don't have color management capabilities to correct it.

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