[I need help for ATI users, please supply the steps to get to ATI's equivelant screen!]
I have spent quite a bit of time lately playing with my 5-year old CRT. I knew it was partially burnt out and that the dark colors ran into one another, but it wasn't until I truly tried color balancing it that I saw how messed up it was. The odd thing is that it burnt out unevenly on the Red Green and Blue colors. Through many trials and errors I discovered there was a relatively EASY way of getting not only a good color balance but a good bright level as well.
DISCLAIMER: Color balance is subjective. I used an LCD as an idea of the color balance I wanted. My CRT is a bit more "yellow" than my LCD but nobody said the LCD was perfect either. Note that the following may seem like a LONG set of instructions, but
this took less than 10 minutes compared to the 3 hours I wasted on a more complex set of steps prior to this set.
I present my findings for a possible sticky post and as a general reference for those that search for color monitor calibration, monitor calibration, or color calibration. (<-- keyword seeding)
I got a new LCD. Setting them up side by side I noticed the backgrounds weren't just off they were different. So I did not set out to make an LCD out of my old CRT, but rather to get a good color setup going so that I could understand what I was viewing. As a side note I could not see the new AH cockpit instruments at all. I could NOT play Half-Life 2 demo without jacking the gamma way high in nvidia color adjustment first (and then lowering it afterwards).
I simply never took the time and effort, thinking "Meh, I know it's off, I can deal with it, besides I don't want to go through all that effort!". And it was a lot of effort. More than I wanted to do at first, but I plowed through it. I set up complex gamma curves for red green and blue in my nvidia color corrections screen and spent a few hours (literally) tweaking the most minute of color tints. Thankfully I screwed up and this was all lost, because armed with that experience I found a MUCH easier way to do this.
For this I will be using the following page.
http://epaperpress.com/monitorcal/Ignore the instructions on the page, but look at the very page itself. It has all the elements needed to properly calibrate your screen and by leaving it up when you do this you can get a good baseline for further tweaking.
A few basics of color correction: You need to adjust your brightness and your contrast. Adjusting your contrast will provide a darker "dark", or "black point" (0% on image at website) -- this should almost always be set to 100% on CRTs. Your brightness you can vary. The brightness is used to set the "white point" (100% in the image on the website).
Before I get too involved I will explain what I "saw" on my un-corrected CRT: The webpage itself had a black menu frame and a dark brown main frame. Even if I played with everything, max contrast max bright and max color temperature, I could only barely see the 10% square. This is a symptom that my CRT is losing its darker colors. Where others might see subtle detail or even obvious detail I saw pure black. The grey square inside the lined box always stood out horribly at any setting because my colors were off along with my bright/dark, so the grey lines came off as brown always and I could never fully set a simple gamma level because it didn't work too well. Gamma curves the adjustment of the levels, it leaves the darks "dark" and shifts everything else up. That's fine if you are losing lighter colors (rarely the case), so I had to shift the entire slope of my colors up a bit.
Okay, set the bright and contrast first: Your CRT has edges where the pixels stop ("off the screen"), use this as an example of "pure black". Get the 0% box on the webpage (
http://epaperpress.com/monitorcal/) to be about this level. If you set contrast too low the black become grey and hazy. Just set the 0% black for now we'll adjust things in 2 steps after this.
Okay then set the white point. You don't want it too white. You want the white to bee as white as you think pure white should be. In the process of increasing the brightness you might see other colors blow out a bit, we will probably correct this in the following step. Note that on some CRTs the pure white color sometimes flickers depending on the make and model of monitor. If you are running at 60Hz refresh rate try the next-highes refresh rate your monitor allows. That usually solves it.
Now for the actual adjustment. Don't use adobe gamma. That doesn't solve the burnt out colors problem, it just adjusts smaller shading differences. We're adjusting the entire monitor. You need to access the desktop properties. Right click, choose the "Settings" tab, select the monitor (if you have two, select the one that is the CRT) and hit advanced. In here is a tab for your GeForce drivers for those with nVidia cards. Find nVidia's "color correction" screen -- it may be on a pop-out tab to the left of the screen if you have some drivers.
You cannot simply jack up the brightness and contrast. Why not? It doesn't help! It gives you brighter colors that are still out of balance to each other. The square in the field of black and white lines still stands out like a sore thumb.
What are those black and white lines? Simply put, they are 50% grey. The grey square inside "should" be 50%, and the black and white together make up 50%, so when properly balanced and set the square should blend in if you don't focus on it too closely.
Here is the easy way of color correction. This is the default screen:
Choose "All" under the "apply color changes to" field, otherwise it will only affect one area, when you need it to affect all areas. You want it to show things properly in games and on the desktop and in full motion (like watching movie clips and stuff). Select "all channels" from the box underneath that one. Then at the bottom select under "Color Profile" the option that says "Advanced mode". The graph is how colors show up. The top right is the white end and the bottom left is the black end. We want to shift only the black end up (as that is most likely the burnt end of the spectrum). Click and hold on the box and slide it straight up. Keep it on the edge but move it straight up. This scales all colors between black and white up, not just shifting some colors like a gamma curve would do.
This is not the end solution. This is the first half! Slide this up until you can see a difference between 0% and 10% on the webpage (
http://epaperpress.com/monitorcal/). You want to see it faintly but clearly. If you have to squint to see it you cannot see it. Not a large difference but you want to see
some difference. If you wish you can save a temporary profile now.
Now, look at the webpage again (
http://epaperpress.com/monitorcal/). We will be using the box-inside-a-box and the color of the background on the main frame. Chances are they are yellow, red, or brown tinted, depending on your burnt colors.
Now, select the drop down box below "Apply color changes to" -- it should say "All channels". Choose one single channel. Do not select "All channels" at any point after this or you will lose your RGB work. Click and hold the box on the bottom/left of the graph (it should be where you left it) and slide it up and down to change the tint of things.
Find what kind of tint you have first. If you have a yellow tint you need to adjust the red and green down and the blue up. Think of it as additive colors. Red and green make yellow. If you have too much yellow you must reduce red/green or increase blue to counter it out. Be careful: In reducing some red green or blue levels you can reduce the overall levels and lose your 0%/10% difference again!
Look at the webpage again (
http://epaperpress.com/monitorcal/). The background of the main frame should be a dark grey color. It should be a neutral grey, NOT tinted either blue or red/brown. Greys can have blue tints or brown tints, and to find a neutral shade of grey slide your "black point" box up and down in the graph for the red and blue colors. Slide it too far then move it back, this way you know you have the middle point. Adjust/fine tune a few times between red and blue. This will help remove and color bias in the image you see on your screen.
Now concentrate on the box-inside-a-box. Adjust the colors (only moving the bottom/left box, don't mess with the white point unless you really need to to get a good "white point"). Try to get the 50% grey background to blend fairly well with the inner box. You don't need perfect, close is good. We're not done yet but we are VERY close!
(finished in part2, length limit exceeded)
