If you are a graphics designer, photographer or if your work involves any graphics related activity, then you would obviously want the pictures to be displayed as natural as is possible on your computer screen. Even though most of the computer screens these days are coming with proper settings for different colors and the gamma settings, some of the monitors are still being built with non-standard gamma setting. The standard gamma setting for today’s monitors should be 2.20, because this has become a standard for all the pictures on the internet and digital photography. If you want to find out what your monitor’s gamma setting is or if you want to change it to 2.20, then you can use the free QuickGamma utility.
The QuickGamma utility is a small Windows application that allows you to easily correct the gamma value of your computer’s monitor. You can download it from the QuickGamma website. After the installation, it can be launched from the desktop shortcut.
The main window of QuickGamma shows gray and black scales and allows you to change the gamma factor by clicking on simple + and – buttons. I was surprised to see that my own ViewSonic monitor that I bought in 2011 had a gamma value of 2.19.
Other than the gray and black gamma levels (which sets levels for all the RGB colors), you can also set the gamma levels for individual colors. You can click on the Gamma button to open up another window that lets you set the gamma levels for each of the colors separately.
Clicking on the OK button in the QuickGamma window will save the settings in form of an ICC profile that Windows loads automatically. But before you make any changes to the gamma values, it is a good idea to note down the original gamma values.
Conclusion: The QuickGamma utility allows you to easily adjust the gamma levels in Windows. You can adjust gamma for all the colors together or for each color separately. It has fine lined scale graphics to show you how the picture quality is being affected as you change the gamma levels.
You can download QuickGamma from http://quickgamma.de/indexen.html.