Gamma Correction
Most people have adjusted their gamma settings because they thought colours looked too dark, but few people know why this is necessary. In order to explain gamma it is necessary to talk a bit about how computers handle colours. Computers store colours in a format known as RGB or Red, Green, Blue. This means that all colours as far as the computer is concerned are combinations of these three colours. Usually colours are stored with 24-bit precision, which means that there is one byte per colour channel (red, green and blue). Each byte contains eight bits, so three bytes makes 24 bits totally. Each byte has a value in the range 0-255 and the higher the value the more the channel is "on", and the brighter the colour is. Red: 255 Green: 255 Blue: 255 produces white, the brightest colour, and Red: 0 Green: 0 Blue: 0 produces black, the darkest colour. So the colour 127,127,127 should be half as bright as 255,255,255. Ideally a colour half as bright digitally should look half as bright on your monitor. Unfortunately this is not the case, most monitors tend to show dark colours as darker than they actually are. To correct this you apply gamma correction. With gamma correction correctly set the left and right sides of the test patterns below should appear to be equally bright if you squint your eyes a bit. The left side of the patterns is a mix of brightness 0 and 255 that should look like brightness 127 at a distance or if you squint. The right side is brightness 127 and so both sides should appear to be equally bright. If you haven't set the gamma correction for your monitor and just used the colour profile that came with it, colour reproduction probably will be wrong.

So how do you correct this? If you have software by Adobe installed you can use a program called Adobe Gamma (it's in the Control Panel) to create a colour profile that is correct for your monitor. Problem is, I haven't been able to make windows use any profiles I've made so I suggest you set gamma on your graphics card instead, they usually offer more options than the windows colour settings too. Although it's actually the monitor that's the problem anything that gets the job done is fine by me. You can adjust the graphics cards colour settings by right clicking on your desktop, selecting "Properties", "Settings" and "Advanced". Then there's probably something called "Colour" or "Gamma", which contains gamma settings. Grab the test patterns above and have them open as you adjust gamma settings for each of the three colour channels. Try to use a real image viewer and not a web browser, browsers sometimes do weird things to the colours. Also view them against a neutral background (not bright white or other colours with high contrast). Please note that although the red green and blue samples might look right the grey can sometimes be wrong, the left side will have a warmer tone and won't be as "neutral" as grey should be. If the grey pattern looks bluish or yellowish you have a too cold or warm grey. Try adjusting brightness for the different channels, and altering gamma accordingly. It'll take a little tweaking to get right and it probably won't be perfect but it certainly will be a whole lot better than it used to be.