Most people don’t ever really bother calibrating their monitors because everything looks fine when they first set it up and so they just stick with that. I’ve also done this myself many times, but recently, I tried calibrating my monitor and found that it looked much better than what I had been used to.
Windows 7, 8, 10 and Mac OS X all have built in wizards that help you calibrate your monitor so that it’s not too bright or too dark. For me, my monitors were always super bright and I starting using a third-party program called f.lux that adjusts the color of the monitor during the night.
Once I calibrated my monitors, I didn’t need to use f.lux as often, even at night. In addition to brightness, the colors on the screen looked better after the calibration. In this article, I’ll talk about how you can calibrate your display on Windows and Mac.
Calibrate Display – Windows
To start the calibration wizard in Windows, click on Start and type in calibrate. You can also get there by going to Control Panel, clicking on Display and then clicking on Calibrate Color in the left hand menu.
This will start the Display Color Calibration wizard. Go ahead and click on Next to start the first step. The first thing it asks you to do is to open the menu for your display and reset the color settings to factory default. In my case, I just reset the whole monitor to factory settings because I wasn’t sure what settings I had already changed. If you’re using a laptop, just go through each step.
Click Next and you’ll have to adjust the gamma setting first. Basically, for all the steps, you’ll need to match the screen to the center image, which is considered the best setting. It also shows you the too high and too low settings so you can clearly see when you’ve adjusted too much.
Note that when you try to adjust the slider in the Windows program, the monitor may reset to its own default settings. Most of these settings you have to change via the monitor on-screen menu itself and not using the program (unless you’re calibrating a laptop display). You just use the program to make sure it looks like the image that is considered good.
For example, here is a picture of my Acer monitor and the on-screen settings that can be adjusted. In my case, I had to adjust the gamma value from this on-screen menu because it wouldn’t let me change it using the slider in Windows.
After gamma, you will need to adjust the brightness in order to distinguish the shirt from the suit and have the X barely visible in the background. You can skip brightness and contrast for laptop screens.
Next up is contrast. Again, adjust the setting on your monitor. For contrast, you want to set it to the highest value possible before the buttons on the shirt start to disappear.
The next screen will help you adjust the color balance. Here you want to make sure all the bars are grey and that there are no other colors present. In newer monitors, this is taken care of and if you try to adjust the sliders, the monitor will just reset to the default values, so you can just skip this part if that is happening to you.
Once you finish this, the calibration is complete. You will now be able to click on Preview and Current to see the difference between the what you had before and what it looks like now.
I would also leave the ClearType Tuner box checked before clicking Finish. This is another short wizard that will make sure the text is appearing crisply and clearly on your monitor. You basically have to go through five screens and choose which text looks best to you.
That’s about it for calibrating a Windows monitor. Between the monitor software and this wizard, you really don’t need anything else unless you are a professional, in which case you’re probably going to have a high-end monitor anyway.
Calibrate Display – Mac
For Macs, the wizard is a little bit different when it comes to calibration. It also depends on what version of OS X you are running. I have written this article running OS X 10.11.2 EL Capitan, which is the latest version.
To get started, click on the little Apple icon at the top left of your screen and then click on System Preferences.
Next, click on Displays in the list.
Now click on the Color tab and then click on the Calibrate button at the right.
This will bring up the Display Calibrator Assistant introduction screen that will guide you through each of the steps.
The Mac wizard is actually pretty smart and will remove any of the steps that your monitor cannot support. For example, I ran this on my MacBook Pro laptop and the only adjustment I could make was to the target white point. It skipped brightness/contrast, native luminance response curve, and gamma curve. If an external display is connected to your Mac, you’ll get the other options.
For target white point, you can either use the native white point for your display or adjust it manually by unchecking the box first. I found the native white point gave a better color tint to the display than what was set when the OS was installed.
I didn’t have an external display for my Mac, so I couldn’t get the other options like luminance, gamma, etc, but you can probably figure it out as you go through the wizard. The Admin step just asks if you want to make this color profile available for other users or not and Name step lets you name your new profile.
The summary screen will give you some technical details about the current color settings for your display. OS X also has another tool called the ColorSync Utility that lets you repair color profiles, view all profiles, and calculate the RGB values for any pixel on your screen. Just click on Spotlight and type in ColorSync to load it.
As I stated earlier, most people won’t ever worry about calibrating their monitors because most of them do a pretty good job by default. However, if you are picky about how everything looks on your screen, it’s worth giving it a shot. If you have any questions, post a comment. Enjoy!
Jan 06, 2016 10:48 am | Aseem Kishore | Computer Tips
How to Create and Mount a Virtual Hard Disk in Windows
In Windows 7, Microsoft introduced a new way to backup your computer called Backup and Restore. Basically, it let you backup all your data to another location and gave you the option to create a system image also.
If you chose to create the system image file, you would end up with a large VHD file. This file could then be used to restore your entire system at a later point. This tool was so popular that they kept it in Windows 8 and Windows 10. If you go to the Control Panel, you’ll see one applet there called Backup and Restore (Windows 7).
The nice thing about backing up your computer using this method, other than being able to restore it fully later on, is that you can attach this VHD file to any Windows 7, 8, or 10 computer and access the data just like a normal hard disk.
So if you just need to copy some files over from your backup, it’s makes much more sense to just attach the VHD file to your PC rather than restoring the backup, which will wipe your machine clean first.
In this article, I’m going to talk about how you can attach this VHD file to your computer and access the data. I’m also going to talk about how you can create your own VHD file and backup whatever data you like. Lastly, you can read my previous post on how to convert your current PC into a VHD file.
Mount VHD File
To mount a VHD in Windows, you have to open Computer Management by clicking on Start and typing in Computer Management in the search box. You can also go to Control Panel, then System and Security, then click on Administrative Tools and then click on Computer Management. If you’re in icon view, just click on Administrative Tools.
Now click on Disk Management in the left hand menu and wait for the list of drives and partitions to show up. Next, right-click on Disk Management and choose Attach VHD.
In the dialog box, go ahead and click Browse, navigate to the location of the VHD file that you want to mount and then click OK. Note that unless you check the Read-only box, you can add, modify or delete files/folders from the virtual hard drive. This is really useful because you can attach your VHD file, add some more data that you want backed up and then simply detach it.
Once it has finished mounting, you will see it display as another Basic disk that is colored a light blue. Windows should automatically give it a drive letter, but if not, you can right-click on the part at the bottom where it says Healthy (Primary Partition) and choose Change Drive Letter and Paths.
Once your VHD is attached, go to Explorer and you’ll be able to browse the disk, copy data back and forth, etc.
To detach the VHD, right-click on the grey area that has the disk name (Disk 2 in my case), volume type (Basic), size, etc. You’ll see the option Detach VHD at the bottom.
Create VHD File
As I already mentioned, you can convert your current Windows machine into a VHD file using a free tool from Microsoft or you can create an empty one from within Windows. Again, go to Computer Management, click on Disk Management and then right-click on Disk Management.
Instead of choosing Attach VHD, click on Create VHD. This will bring up a window where you can specify the size of the VHD file, the format and the location.
I recommend choosing the VHDX file format since it is less prone to corruption and can support larger disk sizes. If you choose VHD file format, it will recommend Fixed size. If you go with VHDX, it will recommend Dynamically expanding. I would leave those settings with the recommended options. Make sure to type in a value for the size of your virtual disk. You can change it to GB or TB if you like using the drop down.
Now in Disk Management, you will see another disk (Disk 2 in my case) that says Not Initialized and Unallocated. In the grey section for the new virtual disk, right-click and choose Initialize Disk.
Next, you’ll have to pick whether you want to use MBR or GPT. For a full explanation of each partition format, check out this post by HTG. For compatibility with versions of Windows older than Vista, choose MBR. For newer features and bigger hard disks, use GPT.
Now right-click in the white area that says Unallocated and choose New Simple Volume. This will bring up the new volume wizard. First, you have to choose the size of the new volume. It doesn’t have to be the full size of the unallocated space. You can create multiple partitions if your VHD is larger.
Click Next and choose a drive letter to assign to the partition.
Lastly, choose how you want to format the drive. By default, it is set to NTFS, but you can also choose FAT32 if you like. I recommend sticking with NTFS if you are using the virtual hard drive to backup files from your computer.
Click Next and Finish and you’re done. Now the drive should show up as healthy in Disk Management.
Now you can simply copy data to the drive normally and then detach the VHD when you are done. It’s not the only way or necessarily the best way to backup your computer, but it works well and it doesn’t require any third-party tools. If you have any questions, feel free to comment. Enjoy!
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