I had covered some simple steps to adjust monitor brightness and contrast and since I am no expert asked readers to share their methods of keeping displays properly tuned.
Fernando had suggested in comments Calibrize tool that he uses.
What it does
Calibrize offers two test patterns and instructions to make adjustments to get proper settings.
First pattern is for dynamic range (black, white and shades in between) relies on using display controls and second is for gamma – Calibrize makes adjustments itself.
Tune process
First pattern is easy to use and provides quite good result (although I tortured my home display enough last time so there wasn’t much to adjust).
Second pattern was no good because it seemed to conflict with Intel graphic drivers. Calibrize suggested to re-adjust with first pattern after tweaking gamma, but as soon as I touched brightness/contrast controls in drivers (native display menu in my model sucks) gamma tweaks were lost.
As I understand it was also supposed to create color profile, but it didn’t happen. Other issue is that Calibrize adds background process to system claiming it is needed to keep settings adjusted.
Overall
While Calibrize offers good patterns and instructions, changes that it performs in system seem to be unreliable and inconvenient. Since calibration patterns are quite abundant (even as simple images and web pages) I see little need for Calibrize with such performance.
Maybe just my bad luck with drivers, but way more people use Intel drivers at home or work than those who have fancy external graphical cards.
Ad-supported freeware, that tries very hard to be non-portable.
Home&download http://www.calibrize.com/
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Calibrize? But doesn’t everything depend more on the ICC (?) profile loaded for the monitor. Adobe programs come with numerous color profiles from which to choose. One would have to select a profile which matches the desired output on the specific printer; then, I suppose, one would calibrize if the screen color differed dramatically from the output color.
@jasray
You are asking wrong person, not my area. :) Since I don’t work with graphics much – limit of my needs is that what’s on scren doesn’t lose detail and colors roughly make sense.
Anyway even with tiny bit serious need for properly calibrated monitor you’ll have to invest in hardware calibrator. But for the mortals some test patterns and manual tweaking will do, better than nothing.