A week or two ago I took the plunge and bought a new monitor as working with programs like Flash, Dreamweaver and Director on a tiny 15″ screen was just getting ridiculous. Granted I only upgraded to a 17″ but the bigger screen resolution still makes all the difference.

Upon switching on the new monitor I noticed the colours were all washed out and pale, adjusting the brightness/contrast on the monitor didn’t help so i turned to the graphics card alpha control and hey presto, immediate improvement but where exactly to set it so the levels are as accurate as can be? Sure you could go out and buy some decent monitor calibration hardware, but what if you don’t have the cash?

This is very important as If you design something on a badly calibrated monitor and then try it on other systems with correctly calibrated monitors the resulty can be ugly. For example, what you thought was black might actually be dark grey and similarly with lighter shades. Colours should also be calibrated so that greys have no colour tint etc.

I found the following links useful and by using them in combination I achieved a decent result:

• http://www.photofriday.com/calibrate.php
  A very simple, single-image tool to calibrate contrast and brightness. I found this to be a good starting point and it’s a 2 minute job.

• http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/
  A more advanced set of test images and detailed explanations of each one. This site checks things such as contrast, sharpness, gamma, black & white levels, viewing ange and response time.

• http://www.imaging-resource.com/ARTS/MONCAL/CALIBRATE.HTM
  Another web page with some test images and information on hardware calibration methods and tools.

If you have Adobe gamma installed this is also a useful tool to use and allows adjustent of gamma, colour temperature etc, and features a step by step wizard.