[eyewoo]

I've devised an image with 36 numbers on it to eyeball test my monitor's gamma calibration. Looking at the image below, you should be able to comfortably see 35 of the 36 numbers. Number 36 is black on black, so it should not be visible.

I'm curious to know if you can see all 35, or if there are numbers that are difficult to see. Essentially, if you can see 35 numbers, you see my images the way I mean them to be seen, gammawise. If not, then either my monitor or yours is set too bright or too dark.



Some refinement for those who can easily see all 35 numbers. The 1 and the 30 should have the same relationship to the background. i.e. the 1 should be dim, barely visible on white and the 30 should be equally dim and barely visible on the black.
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[Mikko K]

Hi eyewoo,

I can see all 35 very clearly. My monitor is calibrated quite bright so I can see detail in shadows better. I've tried to make it close to a generic setting. I used to have max contrast and quite dark brightness but that resulted in bleak looking pics when viewed on non-optimized machines.

[ElfGirlKimmy]

I can see all 35. Woo... <3
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[eyewoo]

OK... some refinement for those who can easily see all 35 numbers. The 1 and the 30 should have the same relationship to the background. i.e. the 1 should be dim, barely visible on white and the 30 should be equally dim and barely visible on the black.
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[spyroteknik]

i see them all quite clearly too, i do have mine set slightly bright for the same reasons as mikko, plus it's calibrated to the printer ive been using so prints come out exactly like what i see onscreen, so everyone see's mine slightly darker online, totally irrelevant info i know, shoul dhave just said the first sentence

[durgldeep]

I can barely see "30", so I'm about right, I guess (this monitor is at 50% brightness). A very useful post, eyewoo. I gather a lot of people who are running CRTs knock their brightness down to zero; I've always fretted about whether or not they're seeing what I see.

[balistic]

my 30's probably a bit too bright, but I run mine that way so that my shadows don't go flat when I'm painting. The limited value gamut of 24-bit RBG is aggrivating sometimes.
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[nafa]

I can see 35 numbers, but my "30" is not so dim. Does that mean my LCD is too bright, or its gamma too high?

Another question: Is there any setting at all that would allow people to see "36" black on black? What does it mean if people can see it?

[Mikko K]

Nafa, it's okay I think. Like Balistic, I also prefer to work bright so I won't mess the dark tones with black. If you keep your monitor very dark, you have to work in a pitch black room to make any sense of the darkest tones.

[eyewoo]

[Affected]

Yes, I see them. On this monitor. If I were to pull this over to the second monitor... let's not go there.

[Naeem]

i see all 35.

[skullmonkeys]

i see 1~35
my 30 is bright. what can i do about it?

[Jin]

Hi eyewoo,

I see all numbers but 36. 1 and 30 are dim but visible as you say they should be.

And here I thought it was my monitor making other people's images look too dark.

For once, I have it right (and don't have a clue how that happened).


Thanks,


Jinny Brown
TutorAlley Forums - again open for new registrations
Tutorials and Painter Info at PixelAlley

[djinni]

For me, 1, 8 and 30 are the least visible 30 is about as or clearer than 8, and 1 is the least visible
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[eyewoo]

skullmonkeys... I'm not an expert in this. Perhaps someone else has a better way, but the down and dirty way is to turn down the brightness control on your monitor or if your system has a way to adjust gamma you can do it that way.

Jin... I'm not exactly clueful... but I have always been bothered by viewing other's work with shadow detail totally gone until I boost my brightness. I'm pretty sure it is because they operate their system with the monitor brightness set too high.

djinni... that sounds about right...
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[neff]

i use a tft, and i can see all numbers clearly
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[eyewoo]

...
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[eyewoo]

tft...??? What is a tft?
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[stripe]

Like an LCD flatscreen monitor.

[eyewoo]

ah-ha... should have google'd it: didn't recognize the acronym

Short for thin film transistor, a type of LCD flat-panel display screen, in which each pixel is controlled by from one to four transistors. The TFT technology provides the best resolution of all the flat-panel techniques, but it is also the most expensive. TFT screens are sometimes called active-matrix LCDs.

Check out other meanings for tft... from http://www.acronymfinder.com/

TFT Thin Film Transistor (Liquid Crystal Display, LCD technology)
TFT Tabular Firing Tables
TFT Task Force Team
TFT Technical Feasibility Testing
TFT Ten Foot Toss (gaming)
TFT Thanks for That
TFT The Frozen Throne (Warcraft III)
TFT Thin Film Technology Corporation
TFT Thought Field Therapy (Roger Callahan)
TFT Thyroid Function Test
TFT Time From Transmission
TFT Tit for Tat
TFT Toy Fox Terrier
TFT Toys for Tots
TFT Traffic Flow Template (3GPP)
TFT Transaction Function Table
TFT Transmission Fluid Temperature
TFT Tri-band Field Terminal
TFT Tune for Time (fastest execution)
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[nafa]

I would be surprised if one can get any LCD monitor for PCs that is not TFT today. Passive matrix LCDs were typically deployed in lower cost laptops years ago when active matrix LCDs are too expensive.

[pxy]

without gamma fixing, i don't see the 3 darkest.
i made another thing though.
http://www.deviantart.com/view/13989413/
http://www.deviantart.com/view/13989341/
with that i don't see 50/256 shades. dark ones. all bright ones. with changing in nvidia settings (slider 20% up for lightness, 20% down for contrast) i see all dark shades, and not 7 white ones. but it's more important, since nearly no pics fade to white.

not seeing #30 is kinda bad. that's 35/256. 34 dark shades lost.
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red alert fogger5:04 snake4:43 22khzmono

[Duracel]

I think a practicle measurement is our speedpaintingthread. Noone posting in there has a fucked up gamma-set, but its a normal variation in everyones calibration. So if most of the pictures look fine, the monitor is calibrated.

Anyway, i agree with Mikko K, daylight can really fuck up all the darks(or you have a bright gamma-set and black looks like light-grey in dim light) ... i guess the best would be a light-meter which switches the gamma-setting depending on how much light is there ... or you have to set some different settings and switch by yourself.

PS: See all 35 Numbers really clear in dim light ... will check it tomorrow on high noon.

On yours, pxy, i see white clear till 4 (for 3 a have to look very sharp ... and there is no way to see 2 and 1) .. black is way harder to see ... it gets real hard to recognize from 23 on ... 20-15? i can only guess them ... and all others are definetly black and no chance to see.
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Detailling a speedpainting is nothing but speedpainting in detail.

[eyewoo]

pxy... my reading is close to Duracel's. With my monitor set for working, I do not start seeing a recognizable dark A on your chart till late 20's, very early 30's... I start just seeing the A on white at about 5 or 6. I keep a constant low light in my studio.
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[Mikko K]

I used to think that monitor setup is very important. Well, not that it isn't but..

Now I'm thinking that if an image has good relative values and they're using the scale wisely, the pic will work on relatively bright/dark setups. If you haven't been messing around with gamma I mean.

If darkest darks and brightest brights are used for accents (Craig's work is a good example) and the whole image doesn't take place in either end of the scale, with standard gamma it should read ok, right?

[eyewoo]

Right... but it would be quite nice if everyone was more or less viewing values in about the same way. In fact it was Craig's work that first got me seriously considering what exactly was going on. Back then, I couldn't see any of his shadow detail unless I cranked up my monitor's brightness controls to their max... and then as the monitors aged, that didn't work until I started dealing with the gamma controls.

So... it would be nice if there were some eyeball standard that people could view to set their monitors to some rough standard... Something like the charts that I've been working with and pxy has presented. I'm not suggesting that either of these methods is the way to go, but whatever the way is, it should not be highly technical. Just simple eyeball stuff that gets everyone roughly on track.
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[pxy]

i did that thing after i saw comment on a pic of "i like her smile". only, i didn't see the face at all.

always before, i thought i was supposed to increase the black level (so the darkest get brighter) of my photos up to 50, i never thought my monitor was broken.

http://tinypic.com/1zsync
this is 60/255 red, and 15/255 green. it should be a little orange.
if you don't see 20 dark shades, it will just be red.

of great fun note is glare will effect what you see. the monitor reflects things in dark parts, so you see dark details less. only light from behind the monitor, how it should be. (but then flat screens don't have this problem, but the one on my laptop removes loads of highlight detail, and greyscales turn to blue)

and the surrounding colour too. like this text in writing mode, it could probably be 90/255 grey, and i wouldn't notice, with all the white around. oh, pic. the lower part is without the white layer.
http://tinypic.com/1zsy8j
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red alert fogger5:04 snake4:43 22khzmono

[luggage]

From dpreview:

http://www.dpreview.com/images/grayscale.gif
with the text

[eyewoo]

luggage... Now that is a good test image... Thanks... I was using 1.8 for my gamma setting, but when set to 2.2, I can see the difference between all blocks from a to z.

Also great link for monitor tetsing programs...
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