color calibration eats babies

I want six hours of my life back.

The windows on the top are Lightroom. The window on the bottom is Finder. The image was color-corrected in Lightroom to have pretty golden colors. In Finder, it takes on a reddish hue.

Approximate sequence of events:

1. N weeks ago: calibrated monitor with USB calibration device A
2. Rebooted computer.
3. 2 days ago: calibrated monitor with USB calibration device B. Did not notice a visible change. No reboot.
4. Restarted Lightroom.
5. Color-corrected image to have golden tones.
6. Saw icky color disparity between Lightroom and finder.

The problem is 3). The calibration device is broken or confused. It has lost the ability to properly calibrate the color red. After calibration, red is rendered as a lovely shade of the color puke. No visible change was noticed after calibration because there was no red on the screen.

The computer booted with a correct color profile. Finder loaded this correct profile on startup, when first logging into the machine. Lightroom loaded the busted profile on startup, and the new busted profile was used for color-correcting. Finder was still running with the old correct profile, so it rendered the colors differently. Relaunching Finder caused it to load the new busted profile, displaying the same golden tones as Lightroom.

Red herring: Photoshop CS 3's "Save for Web" preview renders the image in a color profile that doesn't seem to be sRGB and doesn't seem to be the monitor's color profile. This threw me for a loop for a while. Internet sleuthing showed that lots of people rant about this preview display. Decided to ignore Photoshop for now.

Take-away:
Sanity-check the results of your monitor calibration against another machine, either uncalibrated or calibrated with a different device. A perfect match isn't going to happen, but you should see something in the right ballpark.

Relaunch all applications (including Finder) after changing the monitor color profile. Rebooting gives some additional peace of mind.