Monitor Calibration!

Hey everybody! As some of you may know from the LiveStream, I talked about my monitor troubles. Over the weekend my friend Devin Platts came over with his own computer setup. He owns a mac and also a IPS Dell monitor. The IPS is awesome for viewing your works at different angles and providing better colors in general... Which is helpful for larger screens like mine where you may end up viewing the wrong colors as you view the top and bottom of the screen...

So basically what happened was Devin finished an image and sent it over to me. I then realized that my image was waaaay lighter than his. Also that mine was obviously the one that was off.

What I ended up doing was running my X-rite EyeOne Display 2 for 5 hours. I tried multiple monitor profiles but nothing helped. All were either too light or too muted... Not sure if the Spyder calibration units are better but I haven't used any others besides my EyeOne. So heres what I did...

First of all, I used these as samples to help me best calibrate my monitor! These links also have some instruction as to how you should calibrate your display...

Give all of these a read through if you haven't before.

ePaperPress.com's Calibration Tool
Lagom LCD Monitor Test Pages

Samples to run it by
Calibration Tool
Calibration Chart

Once you get started you can use your actual monitor's brightness and contrast to adjust. But that will only bring you so far. What I ended up having to do was go into my graphic card's settings and manually adjust my monitor using the images provided above. I'm not sure how it works with all cards but I'll show you how I used my ATI Radeon card.

Heres how you get to this file(using Windows Vista 64bit)

>right click desktop
>click 'Personalize'
>click 'Display Settings'
>click 'Advanced Settings' in the display window
>click 'ATI Catalyst Control Center'(or whatever graphics card you have, there should be one for nvidea and others as well)

At this point you can adjust the Gamma, Brightness, and Contrast using the provided links above as reference. Make sure you get a smooth gradient. Also pay attention to the levels to make sure theres a distinction between the brightest and darkest tones(as mentioned on the ePaperPress website).

I had to manually adjust my monitor this way for a little while. But the change was worth it. If you're having trouble locating your card in that advanced settings section you may need to install the driver again. Which is what I had to do when I couldn't find the means to adjust it.  Then theres always Google Search if you really can't figure any of this out. Thats basically what I did to figure out how to fix my setup :).

OR you can cut out all the terrible crap and just buy an Eizo monitor(super expensive) haha or an IPS display. Dell sells a pretty decent one that a lot of people I know use :).

Anyways, hope that was helpful! If I learn more on the subject or if you know of any other info just drop it in the comments and I'll update :).

My continued Master Study -

Metal! - Blind Guardian - "Majesty"