To the left is a handy 'Check' to make sure your monitors Gamma is somewhere close.
If you are not within the 2.2 gamma range, you will not be able to see shadows or highlights accurately as it will be too bright or dark.
Your monitor should have the bands of grey least noticable at roughly the 2.2 mark (Squint a little). This is standard gamma for both MAC and PC (Despite what MAC says about MAC standard being 1.8).
If all looks good:
Dance around your monitor whilst wearing a make-shift neclace from the keys on your keyboard and be satisfied with a job well done.
Put the keys back in your keyboard and you should now be able to work on images and layouts being somewhat more conifident of what you are seeing being near what you will get in terms of a proof.
However, we cannot guarrantee it being perfect as everyone's eyes are different and monitors will wander from their calibration and will need to be done on a regular basis to maintain accuracy... the same can be said for your eyes too.
Clear as Mud?
If all of this seems alien to you and your eyes are starting to water a little... we have a guy who is more than happy to come and do this for you if you are having work done at aus•tex.
All it will cost is a Bacon-Cheese Burger and gas if he has to drive his own car.
Contact Chris on the contacts page.
The grey image on the left should have a total of 52 distinct grey bars. If you don't see all of these, or your monitor shows any pink, blue or yellow casts... then something's a little off... read on to get you back on track.
On CRT monitors, warm it up for at least 30 minutes, then adjust the contrast to MAX and adjust the Brightness so that all the steps are visible (some monitors are better than others... but do the best you can).
If there is a color cast to the image, you can use Adobe Gamma if you have it installed, or use the RGB sliders in your monitor control panel.
With Flat Screen monitors, it's advisable to reset all the controls to factory default, and play with the brightness untill you get all the steps in the greyscale bar.
MAC Users:
You guys have an easier time of things, as MAC calibration software within the operating system is pretty good.
Simply go to 'System Preferences' then 'Displays' then 'Color' making sure the color is set to 'Millions' in the 'Displays' section first.
Once you are there... hit the 'Calibrate' button, turn on the 'Advanced' checkbox and make sure to follow all the directions carefully.
The only things to manually select here are the 'Target Gamma', which should be set to 'PC Standard 2.2' and the white point... which should have 'Use Native White Point' selected.
