On Mon, 29 Dec 2008 17:11:24 -0800 (PST), wrote:
I just learned the hard way the consequences of working with my monitor too bright. I sent out a series of images that no one liked. I finally got some feedback that they were just too dark. They looked great on my, overly bright lcd, but awful when viewed on a well adjusted screen. So I reduced the brightness and now my whites look red and my midtone neutral looks blue. I have been trying seat-of-the- pants gamma curve adjustments on the individual channels but I am never happy with it. One of these days I will buy some calibration hardware but I have other things I need worse for now. If I really knew what I was doing I could look at it say; ok, I have too much red in my whites and the neutral midtones is blue, so I just need to do so- and-so and Voilà – unfortunately it doesn’t work that way for me.
One way to deal with this is called "color by the numbers". To verify a neutral gray, for example, make sure the red, green, and blue channels are equal, or nearly so.
Similar logic can be used to set good skin tones and other important colors, and to calibrate your monitor manually, without relying on a colorimeter, and set the black and white points, as well as the overall gamma of your monitor.
—
Mike Russell –
http://www.curvemeister.com