Alan Ticheler - Landscape Prints

Monitor calibration can be tricky business. Most people would assume that a new monitor out of the box should show everything accurately but the truth is that no two monitors are the same. Even identical models, with identical numerical settings, will show things slightly differently and the matter is further complicated by your motherboard's integrated graphics, your video card and/or your graphics drivers. Worse still, even properly calibrated displays continually change throughout the course of their operational lives.
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For a majority of casual users this probably hardly matters but, for those to whom it does, there are options and, trust us, you may be surprised what you have been missing in your photos & games when you see the difference. Simply put, the brightest and most vivid screen does not usually show you the whole picture.
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There are devices you can buy to help. For casual users there are $100-250 options such as the Spyder, Pantone Huey (if you can find it) or ColorMunki Smile available in most computer stores. For serious hobbyists and visual professionals there are $500-700 gadgets such as the Pantone ColorMunki pro models and, for the most serious graphics pros & print houses, there are high level packages running in the many thousands of dollars.
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For those who don't wish to put out the money, the best method is to refer to color and grayscale bars like the ones below and to make manual adjustments to your monitor's brightness, contrast and color/hue levels.

Along each of these bars you should be able to see 21 separate tones. If you do not, a good place to start is with your brightness and contrast settings. Generally adjusting brightness will affect the darker tones more and you should do this first. Next, adjusting the contrast will affect the brighter tones. If you see tonal differences in some colors more than others, or the bars do not fade to black uniformly, this indicates your color is shifted too much one way or the other and you may wish to change your color settings. If you get lost on all this and somehow things look worse, remember monitors these days have a factory reset option that will take you back to square one.
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If you would like more info about manual or purchased calibration methods simply Google "monitor calibration"