Trying to balance out Brightness, Contrast and Gamma

[Crewman47]

No matter what I do I just can't seem to get the perfect balance between gamma, brightness and contrast settings and I was wondering if anyone could suggest a way to get the perfect balance. My monitor is a Hanns G HG216D and I have the contrast and brightness set to max and my graphics card is an ATI Radeon 9550 and I use the ATI Catalyst Control center to adjust the settings. The settings on the CCC go 0.5 to 3.5 for gamma, -100 to 100 for brightness and 0 to 200 for contrast.

I'd like to try and get the most natural look I can get as well as having so that images with a lot of white don't look too washed out with the white.

Any ideas how I can get this?

Thanks

 

[Mr. B]

Reset everything to defaults and go from here... http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/

 

[Jadzia]

Every monitor is different. Every graphics card outputs differently.

On my monitor, I set my contrast to 40%, brightness to 0, and gamma to suit the lighting in the room, typically around +1.2 or so.

Contrast sets the visual difference between how black and white are displayed. Usually the black is fixed and white is stretched brighter and brighter.

Usually brightness adds white to the whole picture, so that black becomes dark gray, dark gray becomes light gray, and light gray becomes white.

Gamma bends the gradient from black to white (while pure black and white remain constant).

gamma >1 means increase the contrast for dark colours, lower the contrast for pale colours.

gamma<1 decreases the contrast for dark colours, increases the contrast for pale colours.

Look at your pictures and see how they look wrong.

So if there isn't any contrast for pale colours, but there is good contrast for dark colours -- then reduce gamma.

Or if the pictures all look washed out, reduce brightness.