There should be 16 evenly spaced grey boxes. If not, set your brightness and black level again.
All the following configuration should be done under normal viewing conditions in your room. Set the room lighting as it normally is when you are using your display.
Next, set your monitor's white balance to 6500k. On better monitors this should be possible via the control panel under color or some similar title. Options usually include 5000k, 6500k, and 9300k. For best color rendition use 6500k for normal room lighting. If you have extensive tungsten lighting only you might use 5000k. If your room is predominantly lit by daylight (and you don't work at night) use 9300k. The idea is to match the color of white on the monitor to about the same as you eyes see a white piece of paper under normal room lighting.
If you can not adjust the white balance then skip this step or find out the setting for your monitor and adjust your room lighting.
Contrast actually controls the brightness of the lightest color that can be displayed. Set this to maximum (100% or equivalent) for these tests. You will probably leave it at maximum when you are done unless you experience blooming in light areas of the screen. Good monitors will not experience that problem.
Now that the lightest color has been set the darkest needs adjustment. Around the edge of your screen there is a dark border. If possible use your monitor's control to shrink the picture and make this border larger. Then set your screen background to black or create a large black window. Using the monitor's brightness control adjust the background or black window until it just becomes as dark as the border around the picture. Do not go to far or dark colors will all look black.
There should be 16 evenly spaced grey
boxes. If not, set your brightness and black level again.
Gamma is a correction factor that adjusts for the non-linear response of the screen's phosphor. First you need to find the gamma control on your computer (not the monitor).
This is usually available from the display card's controls under the Display control panel. The Microsoft drivers won't support this- you will need to download and install the vendor's own drivers. Not all vendors support this.
Use the config program for your display driver (such as
ffbconfig or pgxconfig). These let you set the
gamma; you will need to be using a linear visual first which you may
need to select prior to adjusting the gamma; you may need to restart
Xwindows if you change the selected visual. (On an Creator graphics
card: ffbconfig -file machine -deflinear true -linearorder first -g <gamma>.)
I don't know. I think there is a control panel for color management.
A note about gamma: settings between 1.8 and 2.2 are recommended. Macintosh and professional pre-press usually use 1.8 which is a good target.
Use the following graphics to set your gamma. Back 6-8 feet away from your monitor and look for the section of the graphic where the brightness across the test pattern and background are equal. This is where you gamma is currently set. Change your display driver's setting to adjust this point to 1.8.
If you later adjust your monitor's controls (brightness or color balance) you will need to re-adjust your gamma. You can usually lower your contrast without effecting gamma, but you may want to check it anyway since not all monitors control brightness and contrast identically.
Look for equal brightness across
the left half of the graphic. The gamma values are on the left.
The square that disappears into the
background identifies the current gamma setting.
I don't have details on how to do this yet, but basicly you adjust your monitor's color bias and gain controls (if accessible) much like you adjusted your brightness and black level. Individual RGB channel gamma settings can also effect this setting but you should adjust your monitor before altering channel gammas. Careful- you change white balance when you adjust color gain.
The colors in the strips below should each have 16 different shades. If they run together at either end you'll need to adjust your monitor. (If green is OK but red and blue are one bar off your current settings are probably fine. The green phosphors are more efficient and eyes are more sensitive to green. It is not ideal, but unless you are matching color for pre-press work 1 bar difference isn't worth the hassle to fix.)
Another way to adjust color on systems that have tint and color controls is to use a standard SMPTE chart (below). You'll need to turn off your monitor's red and green signals to do this. Again- I have not written this part yet.
Here is a program that helps set and evaluate your monitor's performance (windows 98 and up). Useful for focus and convergence testing and setup which is not otherwise covered here.
This is a 8-bit blue square. It represents all possible values of blue in a 24-bit color system. Displays which do not support full 24-bit color can not properly represent this square. Many cheap LCD displays are only actually 6-bit depth per color (18-bit total).
