Monitor Calibration Correctly displaying the natural colors of a flamenco guitar on a computer monitor can be as challenging as correctly displaying skin tones. A few quick adjustments, however, to your brightness, contrast, color balance, and sharpness settings should help you view the guitars as they would appear directly to the eye. Brightness/Contrast On a properly calibrated monitor it should be possible to see a subtle difference between each of the 17 areas or bands of grey (to the left of the red line) in Example 1 and Example 2. The area to the right of the red line should be "pure" black (as is the background of this web page). If you can distinguish different bands of grey to the right of the red line, your brightness may need to be reduced. If you can not differentiate between the light colored bands on the far left side you may need to decrease your brightness and/or increase your contrast. If you are using a laptop computer with an LCD display, you may have difficulty separating the bands on the left end of the brightness range. This is not unusual on some LCD displays. Example 1 Example 2 Color Neutrality It is fairly common for computer displays (especially on laptop computers) to have a slight, if not significant, color cast or color bias. This means that images on a computer are all being displayed with a little too much blue, or red, or green. Take a careful look at Example 3 below. All the areas, including the white, grey, and black should look neutral - in other words, they should not be bluish, brownish, greenish, pinkish, etc.. If you do detect a color cast there are ways of remedying this on most computer. In a Windows environment, left-click on your Desktop screen and select "Properties" from the drop-down menu. Select "Settings" and ensure that your "Color Quality" is set to "Highest (32 bit)". Click on the "Advanced" button and if you have "Color Management" software installed you will be able to increase or decrease the intensity of red, green and/or blue on your display until the color cast, you previously saw in Example 3, has been removed. Example 3 Gamma Very few displays can show a full black to white gradient (see Example 4) without some banding. A band appears as a vertical strip that is all the same color rather than being a gradient - a gradual and horizontal change of color. Typically there will be at least some banding in certain sections of the gradient. If the image, however, shows bands throughout the range, you may need to calibrate your "gamma". Example 4 To check your monitor's gamma, move back from your monitor, squint your eyes, and look at Example 5. One of the gray boxes should merge into the background. That particular box indicates your current gamma setting. Most relatively new monitors have a native gamma near 2.2 and the Internet is also set up for a gamma of 2.2. By matching your gamma value correctly to your monitor, you can significantly reduce banding, but if your gamma setting appears to be between 2.0 - 2.2, it is within normal tolerances and quite acceptable for viewing web images correctly. If you wish to adjust your gamma and have installed any Adobe products on your computer you may have access to a utility called "Adobe Gamma". Take a look for it in your Window's Control Panel. Adjust your gamma value in small increments until the banding in Example 4 is acceptable. Example 5 Sharpening You may be able to slightly sharpening the focus on your desktop monitor by "deguassing" the tube. To do this, locate the "degauss" button or control, and activate it. The screen image will wobble briefly, but stabilize again within a few seconds. Most desktop monitors automatically do a degaussing every time they are turned on, so you will most probably not need to be concern with this process. Note : If you are using a tube-based, desktop monitor (not a laptop LCD), it can sometimes take 15 minutes or longer for the monitor to warm up to a point where images and calibration adjustments are rendered correctly.