Attached Link: http://www.renderosity.com/viewed.ez?galleryid=273205

Hi there, while working on a new movie scene (check the link out for the WIP), I had to realise that my test renders were far too bright for what I intended on my work system as well as on many of my 3D buddies' screens. The problem was identified easily: my home system's VGA and screen were mismatched and set too dark--mainly the gamma was the culprit. I got a professional to set up my home system (much swearing on his part was involved), and it's fine now. Browsing the Vue galleries with my system calibrated correctly, I then had to see that most images here are much brighter than necessary, too. Hence, this post. Well, there's a couple of calibration images floating around the web, but I found the one attached to be the easiest for a quick and dirty brightness / contrast setup as suggested by abovementioned graphics bloke. 1) Set your ambient light to what you're usually working with. i.e. if you're a night person, do the calibration at night with only a few lights burning. 2) Depending on your monitor type (TFT, Trinitron, other CRTs), select an appropriate gamma level. On Windows PCs, using Trinitron, other high-quality CRT or a TFT, this is usually the default 1.00 setting. For older CRT, the correct value would be somewhere between 1.10 and 1.30. You'll find the correct setting by opening a nice photo scan and crank gamma up until the colours wash out. Back of one .1 setting, and you should be set. Mac users usually need not worry about that and leave the gamma alone. 3) Open the greyscale image, if possible on a black background. 4) On your screen / VGA, turn brightness and contrast all the way DOWN. 5) Turn the contrast UP until the "A" value (white) actually looks like pure white. 6) Turn brightness UP until you can barely discern the "Y" and "Z" values. It should be hard to see a difference; if there's a huge difference between "Y" and "Z", your screen is set up too bright and you need to back down a bit. On older screens, you may be forced to settle with a compromise, i.e. discernible difference between "W" or even "X" and "Z". 7) That's it, you're done. You can now start calibrating the colour settings, colour temperature etc. using other test images (best are colour-corrected photographs of people's faces). I don't intend to sound patronising with this posting, if I did: my apologies. But I see sooo many excellent renders and images on Renderosity which would still benefit greatly from proper brightness/contrast levels that it makes my heart ache. :) I hope this topic has not been discussed to death before, if it has: sorry for this thread. But give it a shot, anyway. Have fun, -Sascha.rb