MONITOR CALIBRATION

This is a quick monitor calibration guide. Do not expect this calibration to do wonders with your old monitor. It just help you to quickly adjust your contrast and brightness settings and get correct reproduction of highlight and shadow areas of the photos on your monitor. This simple calibration has not gamma correction abilities, so you cannot eliminate color shading, caused by a monitor production flaw.

If you want the best color management on your browser, I strongly recommend that you use Firefox or Safari. IE does not have color management and often dispalys very saturated and high-contrast images, especially if you are on a wide gammut monitor.
If you use Firefox, you have first to enable the color management. You can do this with a special add-on or manually, but I'd recommend the add-on way.

Some monitors are completed with calibration software so please check your monitor installation CD. It is much better to use a calibration wizard, than this simple guide. If you have not such software, you can download a free calibration wizard here (WINDOWS only!).

Make sure your monitor is running in True Color (32 bit) or optimum recommended mode, with the optimum or highest resolution that can support a minimum of 75Hz refreshing rate. Note that these values depend on both your monitor type and your display adapter technical characteristics. Your monitor may support high levels of color quality and refreshing rates, but if your adapter cannot support them, you'll be obliged to run in lower, less comfortable mode.

1. Adjust the brightness and contrast controls of the monitor to the highest values.

2. Now look at the dark rectangle to the right. There must be a light rectangle in the black one. See it?

3. Start to decrease the brightness and adjust it so you make the lighter rectangle as dark as possible, but still discernable from the outside black.

4. Now look at the gray vertical strip at the right. It must be a neutral gray. Otherwise you will need to adjust the color temperature of the display under the monitor setup menu.
Note, that there are a lot of monitors that have not such controls. In this case you must use a calibration software to fix the color cast problem.

WARNING: You must run ONLY one monitor calibration program on your system.