
- calibration_chart_bg_cccccc.jpg (66.77 KiB) Viewed 19564 times
We often get/make comments about increasing/decreasing contrast/brightness etc. Our recommendations will be incorrect if we don't have a reference to talk about them. So the first step is to calibrate the display. The best solution is to buy a hardware display calibrators (X-rite/Spyder etc). If you don't have one there are monitor calibration softwares - Adobe ships one with its Photoshop suit and there are a few public domain softwares. The software (only) based solutions are not very accurate but is definitely better to use than leaving the display uncalibrated. We have just added a calibration chart at the end of the image page now to let you decide whether your display needs calibration. There are 4 rows each of grey, red, green and blue and each containing 16 different shades. If you can't see them all then your display needs calibration. What you see on your display is different than what others see on theirs for the same image. Your views about contrast/brightness will not be accurate.
Here is a (not very scientific) approximate simple method to calibrate.
1. Open an image (or this page itself) and look at the calibration chart displayed (above) -
If you don't see all 16 shades properly then
- Set the color temperature at 6500K or sRGB (using controls on your LCD/CRT display)
- Set the contrast of your display at 100%
- Set the brightness at 0
- Start increasing the brightness such that you still see the all 16 different shades in each band and brightness level is comfortable for your eyes.
This probably may happen some where around 50+% of brightness control
- If you have knobs to control colors separately (R,G,B) tweak them to make sure the top grey band remains grey - no color cast seen in the grey band.
- Save all settings
- Repeat this procedure once a month.
Please note this procedure will not give you accurate calibration but is far better than using un-calibrated display.
Hope you find this useful.