On this page you will find some helpful images for a simple TFT / LCD TV or Monitor calibration which doesn't need any technical equipment. All you need is your eyes, your brain and the 6 calibration images from this page (use download link below or click on the large image on the right side).

Of course this method is a very simple and rough technique to adjust the settings of your LCD but it works much better than playing around with the values randomly. The calibration techniques described here are made with new generation Full-HD LCD TV's in mind. But you can also use the very same method to calibrate your TFT or CRT computer screen.

Getting Started

First of all you should try to do the calibration with the "standard" or most used lighting situation for the room in which your LCD is being used. E.g. if you're mainly using the screen at night, don't calibrate it at bright sunlight conditions and vice versa. You should also turn on the LCD (with some video signal) and wait for around 5 minutes before you start. Most of the LCD's I have seen so far need some time to reach their full brightness after a cold start.

Downloading the calibration images

The most important task to perform the calibration is to bring the 6 high resolution images from this page to your LCD. The images are saved in "Full HD" resolution (1920 x 1080 pixels).

You can copy the images to a full HD capable notebook or next generation console (Playstation 3, XBox 360) and connect it to your screen to display the images in full resolution. A HDMI connection type will give you the best results although VGA (most Notebooks have that) should be ok as well.

Why Calibrate?

Most modern LCD TV's have a lot of settings for brightness, contrast, sharpness, color values and so on. If you're unsure how and where to find them, you should first have a look at your LCD's manual or manually search through all menus to locate them.

One of the main problems of LCD TV's is the lack of correct color reproduction in dark areas of the shown images. Especially low light or night scenes in movies and games tend to have false colors (e.g. you often get some muddy dark green where you'd normally expect to see a very dark blue area). Unfortunately this can't be solved with all devices. Especially older models (2006 and earlier) have a very limited color range. There's not much you can do about that but you can still perform the calibration process to get the best possible results.

Newer LCD's (especially high quality products) often have a lot of unused potential under the hood. The most "factory default" values are usually set up for presentations in extremely bright environments (like in malls and shops) and therefore seem to waste a lot of this potential.

How to use the images

The 6 calibration images on this page have been created with the most common shortcomings of LCD's and TFT screens in mind. Image 1 is made for a quick and dirty RGB (Red / Green / Blue) and Grayscale calibration. The color gradients should be clearly recognizable from at least 100% (bright area) to 25% (dark area) of the bars. You should also be able to differentiate the values of the gray gradient in the middle (especially towards the white and black areas).

Image 2 shows a YUV color gradient in the middle surrounded by several accordingly colored photos and will help you doing a rough color calibration for bright images. This is the point where your brain and life experience is going to act in place for some expensive technical calibration equipment. You have to adjust your LCD's color and color temperature settings to make this images look as "correct" as possible. Follow your intuitions and try to test all value combinations to get a good result.

The reproduction of human skin colors in low light footage is a very common problem with LCD TV's. The calibration images 3, 4 and 5 will help you to find optimal settings for human skin tones as well as low light conditions which often can be found in movies (DVD's or Blu Ray) and standard TV footage. All images also have gradient bars to check the brightness and contrast simultaneously. Please also keep in mind that none of the used images are over- or under-exposed. This means with optimal settings you should be able to see details in all pictures.

Image 6 can be used as a final color check. It's showing "real-world" photos of well known things (with typical colors). This kind of "associative calibration" can lead to very good results if it's done correctly. Of course it takes much longer than using real calibration hardware - but Hey, it's for free. :-)

Feel free to contact me for any questions or use the forum on this website to write down some comment.

Click here to download the calibration images (ZIP archive - 5,72 MB)