How to calibrate average monitor brightness?

When I'm making textures, they look good on my own pc monitor, but often they are too bright on other peoples monitors. Is there some kind of average brightness? Some kind of site to check or calibrate? I've searched, but didn't find anything that is reliable.

unfortunately even if you do calibrate your monitor to the standards, most other people don't. but if you'd like to do print matching, the following page is very detailed in it's suggestions on complete calibrations
http://www.normankoren.com/makingfineprints1A.html

I have 4 monitors on my main computer. Two are ultra high end, artist grade, Eizos, and the other two are 7-year-old Samsungs, which are quite low end by today's standards. I figure most people's screens fall somewhere in between, so if a texture I make looks good on both pairs, it should look good to everybody.

If you have the means to get at least one really good monitor, and at least one bad one, that's what I'd recommend. Realistically, most people won't be able to do this, of course, but if you can, it's the only way I know of to be sure the majority of your audience is seeing something at least close to the same as what you're seeing.

As for calibrating a single monitor to cover all the bases, I doubt that's possible. There's such a wide range out there, and most people don't even know that screens should be calibrated in the first place. You could MAYBE configure a high end monitor to look like a low end one, but you'll never be able to do the reverse.


The wording of your post, by the way, is a good example of the kind of confusion that exists among computer users. What do people really mean when they talk about "brightness"? Is it color temperature? Back-light intensity? Black level? White level? Contrast? Color intensity? All of these things (and more) factor in.

People tend to just throw words around without regard for what they actually mean. Someone might tell you your texture is "too bright", when what they really mean is it's too contrasty, or not contrasty enough. Without seeing what they're actually looking at, there's no way to know what they're really talking about.

A general rule of thumb in making your textures look good, if not great, to the widest possible audience is to exaggerate the shading. Subtlety, while quite beautiful on a very high contrast monitor, will be totally lost on a low end, or even a medium grade, screen. That's something I had to learn the hard way.

I once did beautifully shaded white stucco Mediterranean style build for one of my corporate clients in SL. It was a replica of a RL property of theirs. They had sent me brochures with numerous high quality photos, and I worked really hard to make sure the texturing on the build was as photorealistic as possible, with so much subtle shading painstakingly painted in. A few weeks later, though, I realized that I had to redo the whole thing with significantly lower quality textures, since a large portion of the people visiting the sim were seeing the entire build as just a bunch of flat white surfaces. A great many monitors were just incapable of displaying light grays as different from white, so the whole thing would just wash out on them.

Ever since that experience, I've made sure to exaggerate, exaggerate, exaggerate, when it comes to shading. I've never had the problem reoccur. The way I do it now, my textures might not look as fantastic as could be humanly possible on a really great screen, but they do look GOOD on nearly all screens.

I suffer from white wash. Around 251+ means I see white. I can almost get the highs, but I have to absolutely destroy everything lower. It is my monitor and nothing I can do about it.

One thing I always consider is the level at which the monitor adjustments take place. For me, usually 1 of 3 options. Use buttons on the monitor itself, use OS settings, or Adobe's gamma do-hickey thingie. Can really drive you batty if you don't keep track of where you are making your adjustments. I stick mostly to OS settings for bulk, then only minor tweaks using Adobe. Only when things are exceptionally wrong will I fiddle with the buttons on the monitor; when I do this, I make sure to reset OS and Adobe *before* I start messing with buttons.

I guess...
monitor buttons = gross
OS settings = medium
Adobe = fine tune

I don't know.
I mean, I don't know how 'correct' or 'professional' my method is.
Heh.

Thanks to you both. My main problem is with white textures or other very bright textures. When I put some shading into the texture it looks great on my machine, but on other pc screens they are too white (sometimes almost overexposed) and the shading cannot be seen very well anymore.

Void, I've tested a few pictures in the link that you provided. Especially the Printer Test File is good for taking a first glance. I tested it on several monitors. First I thought that the lightest grey (next to the pure white at the top of the picture) wouldn't be visible on those 'bright' screens, but... they DID show very clearly. That makes me think that the difference between the screens has not to do with 'gamma brightness' but with 'contrast brightness'. So I'm going to test that in SL as well and see what happens. I think contrast might be the issue here.

Hehe Chosen, you are absolutely right. I'm proving it myself with the above words 'gamma brightness' and 'contrast brightness'. I don't have an especially high end monitor, just a good consumer monitor. What I'm trying to do, by comparing consumer monitors from friends, is to find some sort of mainstream setting. I admit that this probably won't be possible though. So I also exaggerate shading most of the time. However, for this particular built I really need very soft shading and blending. Sometimes it works when I put shading in the texture itself but also colour the prim with for example 5% grey. But now I think I have to just boost up contrast on my monitor to reach a mainstream level for most pc users, and see where that gets me.

Funny thing is that you cannot ask people to send a screenshot of how they see it on their screens, because any picture they send will be displayed on my own screen with my own settings hehe.

Thanks for your help guys!

heh I started to write my post with all those factors, but thought better of it, as even I get a little fuzzy as to how each one will affect the other (and I've worked in a print shop!)... although my main experience has been that Gamma (being the easiest to acces by a user) and contrast (having the higest rate of change) are usually the biggest culprits in bad image display, as paulo discovered. followed by brightness(and/or backlight for lcd's), color, and color temp... and at 5-6 factors it can be a mess. worse isi that with LCD's you also have viewing angle and distance, which can throw a properly calibrated monitor (oddly enough those affect the first two listed items the most)

Lydgate's dictum that you can't please all of the people all of the time is very apt for SL.

Most viewers will be running the plain vanilla settings on middling quality monitors so the simplest thing is to stick with the factory settings - adjusted to suit the brightness of the room you're working in of course. Our eyes are more important than anything else in this respect.

Unfortunately, the default Windlight settings are very high contrast and this makes SL look bad if you have a taste for softer, more graded tones. In which case, I would suggest tweaking the hue and tone of lighting to compensate for this without going too far in favour of one extreme or the other.

Otherwise customers have the only second opinion that really matters in SL. In most cases, if they have modify rights on an object, it should be possible for them to adjust the saturation of colour in a texture using the colour field under the 'Texture' tab in 'Edit'. A 5% cast of bluey grey, greenish yellow or whatever can make all the difference and although it's not a perfect solution by any means, it is perfectly in keeping with the suit yourself aesthetics of SL.

forgot all about that factor too...
I've been using Caliah's windlight settings which are much more friendly in that respect (not nearly as bright either) but it is just one more factor to consider.

they can be found on the web at this address if anyone is interested
http://secondsoigne.wordpress.com/2008/04/10/optimising-windlight-for-avatars-20/
they're also linked from the wiki windlight page.

Thanks for that, Void. I'll certainly take a look at them. It's hard to find settings that don't make a big visual statement.