Windows 7 Color Calibrate – How to Calibrate your Monitor

Posted on November 11, 2009 at 5:36 am

Depending on what kind of monitor or screen you are using, you may have to calibrate your display to get the proper color settings. Calibrating is highly recommended even if you think everything looks wonderful.

You can calibrate your display in Windows 7 using the Display Color Calibration wizard. You can get to this by going to Control Panel, clicking on Appearance and Personalization and then clicking on the Display header. Then click Calibrate color in the left menu:

You’ll get the wizard which will first tell you to reset your monitor to the default settings. You can set your display to the factory default settings by bringing up the on-screen menu and choosing reset to default.

If you can’t reset your monitor to default settings with one swipe, you might have to go through each setting and manually change them. Here is what you should change it to:

Color Mode – sRGB
Color Temperature – D65 or 6500
Gamma – 2.2

The first calibration test is to adjust the brightness of the monitor so that you can see how dark colors and shadows appear on the desktop:

Note that you should be able to distinguish between the dark shirt and the suit while barely being able to see the X. After you are done, click Next.

Now you will adjust the contrast for the display in a similar manner. Note that you have to use the controls on the monitor to adjust these settings.

Next you can adjust the red, green and blue color balance for your display. You will use these controls to remove any color that is cast from the gray bars.

That’s it! Now you can click Previous calibration to quickly see what your display looked like before you used the tool. Click Current calibration to see the new display after the changes. This is an easy way to quickly see the difference between the two settings.

You can also turn on ClearType Tuner to make sure the fonts appear clean and sharp. You can read my previous post on how to adjust font rendering in Windows 7. After that, just click Finish to save your changes. Enjoy!

» Filed Under Windows 7

Comments

4 Responses to “Windows 7 Color Calibrate – How to Calibrate your Monitor”

johnson b said on : November 18th, 2009 at 3:13 am

I love this, but HOW do I undo a calibration once I did it? I changed the gamma, but now I want to undo it and reset it to default… how do I undo/reset what this calibration feature did?

saqib rehan said on : November 25th, 2009 at 4:07 am

Hi, I have Windows 7 and the text while browsing the web is very small. Is there a similar tool to help me adjust the text size instead of just the color of the screen? Thanks…

rob said on : December 12th, 2009 at 10:42 pm

I calibrated the color on my Windows 7 PC and changed the gamma to the way I like. Then when I turned off the computer and back on, it resets back to the original settings. It says click Finish and everything will be saved. What am i missing?

sukhi said on : December 13th, 2009 at 11:44 pm

I have just installed Windows 7 and whenever i download a new program, my display turns yellow! Every time this happens I have to recalibrate the display! Can anybody help me figure out what is going on?