Figured it out. XD; I figured that it was related to the differing resolutions of the tablet and my monitor, and sure enough…
Had to throttle my monitor back to 1080p and restart the computer, but it works properly now. I’ll just have to remember in the future, maybe they’ll push through a software update at some point. XD
Getting reasonably good color settings on the Huion Kamvas GT-221 Pro
So I’ve been using the GT-221 Pro for a few months now, and it is a very good graphics tablet. Though I do have a few complaints about it that I’ll write up into a review or something at some point. Anyway, what follows are the settings I currently use to get some pretty good colors on mine. Bear in mind that these settings may not work as well for you as they do for me, and I have not used any hardware calibration tool, simply eyeballing. This guide thing will focus on Windows, but it should still be at least somewhat relevant to macOS users.
One of the first things I noticed when I plugged it in was that the default color calibration is absolutely terrible. The contrast is awful, white looks gray, if there was no way to change these settings yourself, the monitor would be essentially unusable. Thankfully though, changing these settings is fairly straight forward.
I’ve set the settings on mine as follows:
Brightness: 90
Contrast: 50
DCR: Off
Color Temp: User
Red: 50
Green: 50
Blue: 50
As you may notice these are some pretty neutral settings, and they are not enough to make the monitor look quite as good as you’d expect. Yet. After setting the monitor to these settings, you need to also make sure that your computer isn’t limiting the dynamic range of the image sent to the monitor. I can confirm computers with Nvidia graphics cards will probably assume the monitor is a TV, and thus set the dynamic range to limited. Though this may not only be an Nvidia-specific thing.
Basically what dynamic range limiting does is limit the dynamic range to 16-235, a setting commonly used by TVs. Basically this will mean that darker and brighter colors will not look that good, as they essentially do not go quite all the way dark, or all the way bright. From my personal experience this actually makes the image look a lot worse. So what we want to do is make sure it does not limit the dynamic range to 16-235, and instead goes with the full 0-255 range.
To fix this (on Nvidia graphics cards):
Open the NVIDIA Control Panel (should be there when you right click on your desktop).
Go to “Change Resolution”, under Display.
Select the HUION display (should just be called “HUION“).
Scroll down to “3. Apply the following settings.”
Tick “Use NVIDIA color settings”.
Set the settings as follows:
After you click apply, the display should blink as the settings are changed. You should basically instantly be able to notice the difference.
Doing this on AMD graphics, or Intel integrated graphics, should be a relatively similar process. Since I use an Nvidia card I can’t tell you exactly how to do it, sorry.
After you have done this, I would also recommend going one step further and using the built-in color calibration tool in Windows or macOS. Or if you really want very accurate color, get a hardware calibration tool. Or wait for me to get one, because I probably eventually will, and then I will definitely share my settings and profile for the monitor.
Follow these steps to use the built-in calibration tool in Windows or macOS.
