Monitor adjustment

[nobrowser]

I'm trying to follow the advice in the monitor adjustment tutorial regarding midtones. But no matter how I fiddle with the brightness and contrast settings, the square on the left always blends best with the gray background, and both the middle and the right square appear lighter.

My monitor is a relatively modern LCD (but definitely on the cheap side):

http://www.viewsonic.com/products/va926.htm

It has a sRGB setting and I normally use that, but the above is true in that mode as well as in the default 6500K mode.

[Colin Southern]

I'm trying to follow the advice in the monitor adjustment tutorial regarding midtones. But no matter how I fiddle with the brightness and contrast settings, the square on the left always blends best with the gray background, and both the middle and the right square appear lighter.

My monitor is a relatively modern LCD (but definitely on the cheap side):

http://www.viewsonic.com/products/va926.htm

It has a sRGB setting and I normally use that, but the above is true in that mode as well as in the default 6500K mode.

Hi "InsertRealFirstNameHere",

There are really 2 things we need to accomplish - calibration, and profiling. Calibration gets your monitor as close as possible to ideal, but it'll never get it perfect; and it sounds to me like you've probably got it about as close as you're going to get it. The next phase is profiling where the profiling software creates and applies a "correction table" to give the colours and levels that final "tweak" to get them into place.

But for that, you'll need a colorimeter like a Spyder III. They hurt the pocket a little, but without one, working with images is pretty much a lottery (with bad odds!).

Hope this helps