How to Calibrate Your Monitor for Free

None of the consumer-grade monitors come with an accurately calibrated display. The reason being, a display needs to be calibrated according to the ambient lighting. The monitor’s manufacturer can’t be sure whether a monitor will sit in a closed office or on a roof-top restaurant. Therefore, you need to calibrate the monitor or get it calibrated according to your requirements. If you are ready to optimally calibrate your monitor by yourself, then here is how to do that.

Preparing Your Display Settings

Start by finding out the resolution of your monitor. It is important to match the monitor’s resolution with the display screen to achieve accurate results. Bring down your display’s brightness to 35 percent and contrast setting to 70 percent. Things won’t seem perfect at this time, but don’t worry and wait till the end. Turn off all the image enhancements and gimmicks, including the contrast enhancement, dynamic backlight, motion interpolation, digital noise reduction, LED dimming, etc. Set the white point or color temperature setting to 6500K.

The User Presets

Keep in mind that monitor calibration is done differently for different lighting conditions. Calibrating a display for daylight will be completely different from calibrating it for night-time lighting. Therefore, it is always good to calibrate your display supported by the desired lighting and save it in user presets. This approach will help you jump to a suitable calibrated display setting according to the lighting conditions. Also, don’t forget to leave the display on for a minimum of thirty minutes before starting the calibration process.

Use the Free Calibration Tool

Plenty of monitor calibration tools are available for free, but not all are as useful as the Lagom monitor test suite. Open the Lagom monitor calibration website, and you will find several pages offering various calibration patterns. Go through the guide below to know about the most useful calibration pages on the website. You can activate a full-screen view of this page by pressing F11.

• Adjusting Black Levels

The black levels display swatches varying from the darkest black numbered as 1 to the purest white numbered 255. You need to dial the brightness level so that it goes from white/grey to the deepest black. Now, fine-tune the display by looking and adjusting the swatches from 1 to 10. When you can differentiate between the dark black background and all the ten swatches, you are good to go.

• Setting Optimal Contrast

The white saturation pattern is useful in decreasing the monitor’s white levels. To achieve perfection, you need to set the contrast levels of your display to the most accurate level. For this, set the highest possible contrast levels for the display but avoid blooming. Now, try to look at the swatches from 200 to 254. Start reducing the contrast level one by one until the ones numbered 251 to 254 are visible. 

• Fine Tune Brightness and Contrast Settings

For the darkest swatch numbered 1 to be visible, you need to increase the brightness of your display. Ensure this adjustment doesn’t turn the black background to grey. Check if the swatches numbered 30, 31, and 32 are differentiable from one another. Adjust the contrast setting till the time these three swatches are distinguishable.

You just calibrated a display with a free calibration tool and naked eyes. The level of calibration achieved should be enough for playing games, watching movies, and other productive work.

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Source : How to Calibrate Your Monitor for Free