Easy way to calibrate a monitor

[nine9s]

I have seen lots of sites but they were complicated. I am wondering if an easy basic steps to do? Any good sites?

 

[DigDog]

for home use, grab a picture such as this: http://webtransformer.com/calibrate/Calibration-Composite-No-ICC-Full.jpg
and adjust your monitor until it looks natural.

for professional use .. it's not so simple :/

 

[nine9s]

It looks ok. Should I print it on a color printer and try to match it on screen?

 

[PhoenixEnigma]

tl;dr: no.

If you're just doing it to have things look okay, make them look good to you and call it a day. You won't be able to get it dead accurate, so err on the side of looking good.

If you need your calibration to be properly accurate, you're going to need dedicated hardware (which isn't that expensive, really - $100 or so). You can probably eyeball the brightness and contrast okay, but colour is very hard to get right simply by looking.

Printing a photo is unlikely to help, either - unless you go through a fair bit of effort, all you're doing is adding another variable (your printers colour reproduction).

 

[Yuriman]

Eyeball - no accurate way. I bought a Colorvision Spyder 2 a few years back for $50, it's a sensor you stick to your screen and it makes a color profile for it.

 

[greenhawk]

It looks ok. Should I print it on a color printer and try to match it on screen?

printing does not help as mentioned, it just calibrates your screen to your printer. In a professional area you get the printer to calibrate to the screen, but all this is pointless if your image is different on someone else's computer.

all you can do is get it right for yourself and call it a day (on the cheap anyway). I personally find a good nature pic and adjust the screen to get it looking right. Some video cards also support colour adjustments which just makes a extra layer of complexity as one might be adjusting for the other and vis versa.

 

[bononos]

http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/
Try the above which seems more comprehensive. I initially used it for an eyeball test for lcd lag which seems to be unique for this site.

 

[nine9s]

http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/
Try the above which seems more comprehensive. I initially used it for an eyeball test for lcd lag which seems to be unique for this site.

Thanks. I found that one before I posted this thread. After messing with it for an hour, my monitor's image did not look so good and I had to reset to factory settings to start over.