How to set up a new monitor on your computer. Manually adjusting screen resolution. Setting the correct resolution

Often, after printing digital photos on a color printer, users are faced with the problem of incorrect colors being displayed.

Those. The photo looks completely different when printed than when viewed on the screen.

To fix this problem, calibrate the laptop screen.

Monitor calibration is a procedure for adjusting its color gamut in order to bring the colors displayed on the device screen as close as possible to the real colors that the user will receive after printing.

After performing the calibration procedure, the image will be almost the same on different computers with different displays.

Display calibration is mainly dealt with by people whose field of activity is related to video and photo editing (both professionals and amateurs), artists and designers, as well as web designers.

The disadvantages of uncalibrated displays include:

• inaccurate representation of colors and shades,
• loss of detail in light and dark areas,
• incorrect brightness and gamma values,
• incorrect display of web page design,
• eye fatigue after working with a computer.

It should be noted that displays on an IPS matrix, although to a lesser extent, also need calibration.

As a rule, special software is supplied with the monitor to perform calibration.

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Screen calibration methods

There are two approaches to display calibration - hardware and software. The most accessible method for the average user is the software calibration method.

Software calibration, as a rule, does not allow one to reach the level of hardware calibration, but this method should not be neglected.

The hardware method is more expensive both in terms of money and the qualifications of the person performing the calibration. The hardware approach can be divided into 3 key stages:

The monitor settings (color, brightness, contrast) are performed in such a way that, in the adjusted position, they meet the requirements of the equipment (spectrophotometer and calibration software).

Configuring the video card for linear operation mode.

Testing the system and saving the changed settings to the monitor color profile.

Advice! For simplified hardware calibration, you can print the image on a color printer, and then change the display parameters to achieve maximum similarity between the digital and printed image.

Preparing to calibrate the screen

The first thing you should start with is resetting the video card settings; all settings should be brought to the standard form.

Before performing calibration, a very important indicator is the temperature of the matrix.

To achieve a uniform temperature, it is necessary to select a video sequence with a total duration of about 4–5 hours, with a dynamic picture, having first expanded the viewing window to full screen.

These manipulations will allow uniform heating of all areas of the display matrix.

The next stage is choosing the right level of lighting. Initially, we recommend working on lighting stability.

This can be achieved by performing calibration on a sunny, fine day in the afternoon.

At this stage, our task is to obtain the most calm, stable and soft light. It should also be taken into account that LCD displays tend to distort colors depending on the viewing angle.

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We calibrate the screen using programs

Screen calibration using Windows is quite trivial and is more suitable for desktop computers than laptops.

To configure, you need to go to Start, write “calibration” in the search bar, and then go to the corresponding menu.

To begin calibration, you must click the “Next” button, after which the setup will be performed using the Calibration Wizard, each step of which is provided with detailed explanations in Russian.

There are quite a large number of programs for performing screen calibration.

In this article we will look at just one of them - Atrise Lutcurve.

The program is paid, but has a 30-day trial version, a Russified user interface, as well as clear instructions for working with each mode of the program.

The installation of the program is unremarkable, so we will not focus on it, but will move directly to calibration.

Important! To improve the quality of calibration, before performing it, follow the recommendations described in the previous paragraph. When making adjustments, you need to fix your gaze and try not to change it until they are completed.

We launch the program, go to the first tab “Black Point” and make the settings.

The essence of the setting is to change the parameters “Black” and “R” “G” “B” until the squares “2,2,2” and “3,3,3” are visible, and the background should remain as black as possible, and the square “1,1,1” should be on the verge of being distinguishable.

When setting up, you should first use the ability to adjust the brightness in hardware (in laptops this is a combination of the Fn key and function keys from F1 to F12) and only then, after exhausting the hardware capabilities, should you configure it in the program.

Go to the “White Point” tab and adjust the contrast so that you see the squares “252,252,252” - “254, 254, 254”.

When adjusting, you want to get as neutral a white as possible, with no tints.

We adjust the gamma in the corresponding tab. In this setting, we should get the color of the vertical columns to differ as little as possible from the background.

Ideally, everything should be gray, although easily distinguishable color is acceptable.

It is acceptable to leave the top and bottom of the columns colored, but the middle part should be completely gray.

If your monitor supports sharpness adjustment, you can adjust it in the Gamma and Sharpness menu.

The essence of the adjustment is to make the squares less visible both among themselves and against the background.

The clarity of the monitor is not adjusted correctly if the stripes of squares differ sharply from each other in brightness.

In the next tab “Color Balance” you can fine-tune the color temperature of the image.

To do this, you need to make the light, dark and mid-tones of gray as desaturated as possible.

After this, you need to return to the previous settings, seeking a compromise on all parameters.

The main advantages of Windows 7 include the ability to simply customize the monitor screen to suit the user's requirements. Of course, it won’t be possible to significantly modify it, but it’s possible for everyone to customize it to their own taste.

The bulk of all the necessary tools for adjusting the screen and font size are located in the “Control Panel” - “Design and Personalization”. It’s even easier to configure by right-clicking on the screen, a menu will appear where you need to click on “Personalization”.

Customizing the Windows 7 screen includes different options: color of the desktop and windows, cursor size, type of sound notifications, etc. It is possible to manually configure each interface parameter. However, it is easier to perform simultaneous customization by using the standard themes provided in Windows 7.

Themes

There are the following 3 types of topics:

Standard ones do not have decorative elements of the operating system (soft lines, transparency, shadows) and create a businesslike appearance.

The advantage is that it reduces the load on computer hardware. This allows older Windows 7 PCs to be used.

Aero has different background images for the screen, which change periodically automatically, as well as individual window colors.

High contrast – designed for visually impaired users.

If desired, it is possible to download more themes from the official Microsoft website. To do this, click on “More Internet Topics”. There are an abundance of topics available to the user here.

But sometimes you only need to change the desktop image or just the window color, etc., without changing the design as a whole. All the required functions for this are located at the bottom of the “Personalization” menu.

Screen background

To change the desktop picture, you need to click on “Desktop Background”. In the window that appears, select the picture you like or a number of them.

It is possible to select from a standard set of pictures in Windows, but by pressing the “Browse” key you can select an image from the “My Photos” or “My Pictures” folders.

Below the picture selection menu there are keys for placing them on the monitor, as well as a slide show function.

Windows background

You need to click on “Window Color” in “Personalization”. There is the possibility of correction - changing the color and tone of all windows in Windows, and it is also possible to adjust transparency, color shades and brightness.

If the user does not have enough of these settings, he should enter “Advanced design options”.

Sounds

In order to configure sounds for events in Windows, you need to click on the “Sounds” button in the “Personalization” menu. You need to decide on the choice of a standard scheme, or manually select the sounds that accompany operating system events.

Perhaps you can simply turn off the sounds by activating the "Mute" function.

Screensaver

To configure the monitor screensaver, you need to click on the “Screenaver” button in the “Personalization” menu.

By default, Windows 7 has 6 screensavers, but if necessary, there are a large number of screensavers on the global network.

To save energy, it is recommended to simply turn off the screen saver.

In the “Personalization” window, commands are available for adjusting icons on the monitor screen, adjusting the cursor and changing the image of the account icon.

How to change font sizes and screen resolution?

To ensure the convenience of working on a PC, you need to adjust the size of icons, fonts, and the clarity of display of inscriptions and images.

These parameters significantly depend on the screen resolution - this is the main parameter of the monitor, determining the number of pixels that fit on the screen.

To adjust the resolution, you need to right-click on the desktop and click “Screen Resolution”. It should show "recommended" in the resolution bar.

Even the outstanding technical characteristics of a monitor do not guarantee that the image on the screen will be perfect. The quality of the picture depends on the display settings no less than on its electronic “stuffing”.

Factory settings in most cases do not allow the monitor to reach its full potential. There are three reasons for this.

1. Saving. The cheaper the display, the less attention the manufacturer pays to setting it up. And even quite expensive models (10–15 thousand rubles) are often far from ideally configured.

2. Individual differences between displays of the same model. At the design stage, the monitor components - matrix, backlight, control electronics - are adjusted to each other: backlight lamps are selected according to the emission spectrum and transmittance of the matrix subpixels, the control electronics sets the shape of the gamma curves, etc. However, the parameters of the components of a single monitor are always slightly different from the nameplate ones, and as a result, the image characteristics also “float”.

3. Background lighting. Factory settings are designed to operate the display under a certain color and brightness of background lighting. However, users have to work at the computer either during the day, when sunlight makes it difficult to see anything on the screen, or in the late evening, straining from the excessive brightness of the image. And the color of external lighting can change from bluish for fluorescent lamps to red for the “Ilyich bulb”. As a result, the shades on the screen will also be perceived differently (the explanation for this is
see below for this phenomenon).

Incorrect settings lead to “crooked” color rendering. Most users don't notice how unrealistic the colors are on the screens they use every day. The human sensory system adapts to color distortions, and over time he ceases to see them. But if you put a “lying” monitor next to another, high-quality and correctly configured one, the difference in the image will be shocking: you may unexpectedly see that the faces in the photographs have an unhealthy blue tint, the grass is acid green, etc. In addition, when processing photographs on a monitor with incorrect color reproduction, the following unpleasant effect may occur: the user adjusts the colors in the photo, unknowingly compensating for the display's deficiencies, and as a result, the image is reproduced correctly only on this device. For example, if the monitor displays a picture with a blue tint, the user will turn down the brightness of this color in Photoshop and the photo will appear yellowish on other displays.

The second blow is taken by the perceived contrast: adjusting the electronics with incorrectly specified gamma curves makes the image faded and faded, or, conversely, too dark.

Fortunately, these shortcomings can be corrected. Most monitors allow you to customize image parameters within a wide range, and even with cheap models, color reproduction and contrast can be significantly improved. As for expensive displays, they can be adjusted with pinpoint precision, which allows them to be used even for professional color work.

At the same time, a well-tuned monitor is important not only for design, digital graphics and printing specialists. The pleasure of playing games or watching movies, as well as comfort when working with text and even the health of the user, depend on the correct settings. We owe chronic eye fatigue not only to constant sitting in front of a monitor, but also to poor image quality.

Preparatory actions

Before you begin setting up your monitor, you need to let it run for about 15–20 minutes. During this time, it will have time to warm up, and the backlight lamps will return to normal operation. In addition, you should clean the screen from dust and traces of touch. For this, use special wet wipes soaked in an alcohol-based composition. They do not leave streaks and not only remove dirt well, but also provide antistatic protection for some time, protecting the screen from dust. It is helpful to read the manual that came with your monitor to understand the controls and available adjustments. Pay attention to the ability to move the menu from the center of the screen to its peripheral part - this may be necessary during setup.

IN Display options Windows needs to set the basic picture settings to the correct values. In Vista, to access these options, right-click on Desktop, select “Personalization” from the drop-down list and in the window that opens, click on the “Display Settings” link. In Windows XP, just select “Properties” in the same context menu.

1. Move the slider in the “Resolution” section, setting the value corresponding to the “native” resolution of the display (in most cases, this is the maximum). Otherwise the image will be very blurry.

2. In the “Color Quality” menu, set the value to “Highest (32 bits)”.

3. Click on the “Advanced” button and in the window that opens, go to the “Monitor” tab. Select the maximum value from the drop-down list.

4. Close all windows opened in the previous steps by clicking on the “Ok” button.

Setting up your monitor using the OSD menu

The easiest way to set up a monitor is to tinker with its on-screen menu. Unlike “ancient” cathode ray tube displays, the best models of which have a “spread out” range of options, modern LCD monitors have an order of magnitude fewer adjustments available to the user (first of all, image geometry settings have disappeared). Three of them are found in the menu of the vast majority of models and allow you to adjust the picture by eye, without using auxiliary “software” or additional hardware devices, although it is impossible to achieve a significant improvement in image quality in such a simple way.

1. Brightness . This parameter sets the overall backlight intensity of the image.

and equally affects both its darkest elements, up to black, and light ones, including pure white. Insufficient brightness makes the picture too dark, the difference between shades of similar intensity in the shadows becomes almost imperceptible (“shadows” and “highlights” are terms from professional photography denoting dark and light areas of the image), they merge with black. And too much brightness on displays with low contrast emphasizes “unreliable” black color. By increasing the brightness using the menu, it is necessary to achieve optimal reproduction of black on the screen, in which it remains quite dense, but shades close to it will be clearly visible. A photograph with a night scene taken with flash is perfect for this purpose.

2. Contrast. This setting should not be confused with contrast as a display characteristic.

Editing the corresponding OSD option will not deepen the blacks on the screen, but will only change the shape of the gamma curves. If the contrast is too high, the picture looks too bright and “hits the eyes,” which is especially noticeable when working with standard text (absolutely black letters on a bright white background). Because of this, the user quickly gets tired, general fatigue increases, and irreversible consequences for vision are possible in the future. Therefore, for everyday work not related to computer graphics, it is recommended to lower the contrast slightly. The picture will not be as rich as with the maximum value, but the strain on vision will be reduced. To view photographs and videos, amateur work with graphics programs and computer games, the contrast should be increased to the required level, focusing on high-quality reproduction of the lightest areas of the picture: if you “overdo it,” then the details in the highlights will disappear.

In addition, the contrast can be adjusted to the external lighting conditions, increasing during the day, especially in bright sun, and decreasing in the evening.

3. Colorful temperature. This term, familiar to amateur photographers, will also be found in the monitor settings menu.

In this case, this parameter sets the ratio of brightness of red, green and blue colors in the image on the monitor. It is measured in degrees Kelvin and is called temperature because it corresponds to the radiation spectrum of a completely black body heated to the appropriate temperature. The higher the color temperature, the cooler (paradox of perception) the hue of the image.

To a person, the colors of objects look the same regardless of the lighting, although in fact they change noticeably - this is clearly visible in photographs. When the lighting changes, the brain finds familiar objects in the environment and sets “white balance” based on them. At the same time, the colors of objects in which he is less “confident” (including on the monitor screen) are adjusted accordingly. This phenomenon is easy to check at home: paper sheets look white in the light of an incandescent lamp, but the document field in Microsoft Word has a bluish tint (unless, of course, the color rendering is shifted towards warm tones; in addition, the strength of this effect depends on the size screen - the brain “trusts” the color of a large object more strongly and begins to take it into account when setting its “white balance”).

By adjusting the color temperature of the display, the user can adjust the hue of the picture to the spectrum of background lighting - then the difference in perception will disappear. LCD monitor menus usually offer several fixed color temperatures to choose from. Lower numbers give the image a warm pink tint, while higher numbers make the gamma cooler, bluish. Standard color temperature values ​​correspond to several types of lighting: 2000K – household incandescent lamp, 3000K – fluorescent lamp with a “warm” phosphor, 4000K – fluorescent lamp with a “cool” phosphor, 5500K – bright daylight, 6500K – medium-brightness daylight ( aka D65, is the standard value for most displays), from 7500K to 8100K – cloudy “weather” and 9300K – shadow. When changing the nature of the backlight, you need to select the appropriate option on the display, but not all monitors have such a wide range of color temperature settings. In this regard, outdated CRT displays are more convenient: good models allow you to set any custom parameter value. On LCD monitors, for this you have to “conjure” with separate sliders for red, green and blue colors.

Using them, only a color correction specialist can set the correct color temperature.

Monitor software setup

The on-screen menu allows only rough adjustments of the display (although even such “processing with a file” in some cases will significantly increase the quality of the picture). You can more carefully adjust image parameters using specialized programs. The principle of their operation is simple: specially selected images are displayed on the screen, and the user changes the parameters of the picture until it takes the form specified by the program instructions. The accuracy of display calibration using such applications directly depends on the visual acuity and meticulousness of the user.

In simple calibrator programs, settings are made using the monitor's on-screen menu. As a result, quickly changing settings is only possible if the monitor allows you to save user profiles. In addition, when you change the color intensity using the OSD menu, the brightness of the color will decrease proportionally in both light and dark areas. Moreover, if the corresponding gamma curve of the display has dips or “humps,” simple linear color compensation can only smooth them out, but not completely eliminate them.

More complex utilities require “feedback” from the user in the form of selecting certain items in test tasks, and “at the output” they record the so-called ICC profile of the monitor, which contains compensating gamma curves that, when superimposed on the display curves, give uniform color rendition throughout brightness range (of course, with strong errors, but this option is still better than simple linear compensation).

Most utilities for subjective monitor calibration are universal and allow you to adjust all image parameters in one pass. However, we recommend using two different programs to adjust the display: one is more suitable for adjusting brightness and contrast, the other is better at color correction.

4. Set the contrast control in the monitor OSD to maximum and the brightness control to minimum.

5. Increase the brightness until the background and all the dark rectangles at the top of the scale are visible. Now gradually reduce the brightness until only rectangles numbered 6 to 24 remain distinct, and the leftmost one, corresponding to a hue with an intensity of 1.2%, merges with the black background.

Remember that if you set the brightness in the menu too high, the monitor will not be able to display blacks correctly, and if the brightness is too low, it will cause loss of shades in dark parts of the image.

6. After adjusting the brightness, select the appropriate contrast for the ambient lighting conditions. As you decrease it, stop at the value at which large rectangles around the central scale will remain clear and will differ sharply from each other in intensity. You can control how the monitor displays the lightest shades close to white using the lower half of the central scale. It’s not scary if the rightmost rectangles with numbers 252 and 249 merge with the white background - this is how it should be if the contrast of the picture is normal.