skreidle | Monitor colors..

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Is there any website I can go to, or software I can download, to help me calibrate the colors on my monitor to some reasonable standard? My monitor's defaults are too dark, but if I just turn up the gamma or brightness, I wash out lighter colors.

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blaisepascal

Color calibration is a black-art, and there is no real way to do it. For starters, you need something outside of your monitor to compare it to -- like a color card -- but the appearance of the color card (and the color on the monitor) is going to look different depending on ambient lighting, etc. And color cards are reflective, while CRTs are emmitive, so they react different to ambient lighting.

Most web-sites that talk about color calibration describe how to set the white and black points on your monitor, and give -some- information about gamma -- but point out that it's a thankless, virtually impossible task to calibrate all colors. I found http://photogenica.net/color/color.html to be a good starting point, but I also followed the links on the bottom of the page for more indepth info that was also useful. The greyscale bar on the photogenica site claims to be 100% white to 100%black in 10% intervals, but I count 20 discrete shades of grey. One of the other sites gives a better greyscale calibration scale that is easier to use. The other site has separate pages for white and black point calibration (most sites, including one I read a while ago that went -heavily- into the theory, basically say "turn contrast to max", which works in practice).

Between the sites, I was able to determine that a) the best white-point is too bright for me if there is large amounts of white on the page, b) blackpoint settings are trecherously difficult to get right, and c) my system has an overall gamma of about 2.2 -- which is TV standard.