Advanced Monitor Calibration:

Adjust your monitor's brightness and contrast settings to see 21 distinct squares. The default settings for most PC monitors will crush 4 or 5 of the darkest squares to black. Raising your brightness and contrast settings will allow you to better see a full range of tones for all images viewed on your monitor.



You should be able to see some detail in the shadows of this guy's face.


A more accurate technique is to adjust your monitor's gamma, which requires special software:

If you have Adobe Photoshop, it comes with a great tool - the gamma control panel from Knoll Software. If it is installed, Mac users will find it under APPLE MENU > CONTROL PANELS > GAMMA. The following link has instructions on how to install and use it. (Scroll down to "SET UP YOUR MONITOR'S GAMMA")
http://www.epi-centre.com/charts/charts.html

Another useful tool is the "Adobe Gamma" control panel. It includes step by step instructions. PC users will find it at: START > SETTINGS > CONTROL PANEL > ADOBE GAMMA. Mac users will find it under APPLE MENU > CONTROL PANELS > ADOBE GAMMA. Detailed information about Adobe Gamma is available at: http://www.adobe.com/support/techguides/color/gamma/gamma.html

Adjusting your monitor's color:

The color temp of your monitor should be set to 6500K.

There's not much else you can do. If you are not happy with the appearance of the color bars at left, try going back into one of the above mentioned gamma control panels and tweaking the color settings. The overall color balance of your monitor can be adjusted either by setting a "custom" color temp on your monitor or with the gamma control panel from Knoll Software mentioned above. [By the way this can be very handy to color balance a monitor for shooting on tungsten film]

That's it, now go watch some reels.