Are your images appearing too dark?

What's causing it

The lack of standardization in dealing with monitor gamma values causes different monitors to display the same image using different brightness, and even different colour hues. As a result, an image that looks great on one display may appear too dark or too bright or even in different shades!! Dark red fleshtones are common manifestations of failing to correct for CRT gamma.

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How to patch it

Unfortunately, it is not possible to standardize the display so that all monitors show exactly the same image. However, the image quality can be improved so that it does not appear too dark anymore(this happens to be the most frequent problem).

For Netscape in the Linux platform:

Go to Edit--->Preferences and click on the "Navigator" tab and then click on the "Applications" tab. This should bring up the helper applications list that Netscape uses to handle different file formats. Scroll down to the description of the file type that reads "GIF Image" and then click on "Edit". By default, the "Navigator" button will be pressed. Press the "Application" button and type in the following string "xview -gamma 2 %s" , if the xview binary is available; else type in the string "xv -gamma 2 %s" if the xv binary is available. If the images are still too dark, change the "2" in the string to a "3" or "4" as required.

For any browser in the Windows (Win 95, Win 9x, Win 2000, Win NT) platform:

Unfortunately, no easy solution exists in this case. The only way out is to save the images to disk by right clicking on them and choosing "Save image as..." Then, use an image editing program to do gamma correction on the image and then view it. However, only sophisticated image editing programs like Paint Shop Pro, Adobe Photoshop etc are capable of doing this. Also remember, to do the same amount of gamma correction to all the images so that they all can be judged on the same basis.