Text Color Combinations and Eye Strain? 27
jalewis asks: "I was staring at the screen and the white background started to pulsate. It made me wonder if maybe my Eterm color choices are bad for my eyes. Is there a combo that put the least amount of strain on your eyes?" I can understand this. I remember back when those monochrome (yes, monochrome! I'm dating myself again) monitors came in terrible shades of red or green. I really appreciated CGA cards with their better handling of text colors when I first started working on PCs, as for general text, I'm still partial to greyish-white text on dark backgrounds. What foreground/background text colors work best for you?
Re:I have heard.... (Score:3, Informative)
In Word2000, go to the Tools menu, and select Options. The setting is on the General tab.
Several points (Score:3, Informative)
Quick-and-dirty monitor calibration (long) (Score:5, Informative)
It's easy to set them up in a more-or-less correct fashion, without such gizmos as color analyzers (though they certainly make things easy).
Some of this is might seem trivial and obvious. For some reason, however, most people still don't get it right. The following is a quick-and-dirty guide to setting up all manner of CRT displays.
First, get the monitor's geometry right. You'll need a solid image for this - almost anything will do, as long as it stretches to all edges of the display. A solid-color desktop is fine. Tweak the size and pincushion and slant and rotation and whatever else you've got, until the displayed image stretches as far to the edges as possible without going over. After that, work on making it square, from -your- perspective, as you normally use it. Some, most, or all of these adjustments will interact with eachother, so you may have to revisit each several times to get things right.
Now that your display is as big as possible (always a good thing), it's time to start on the finer points of eyestrain reduction.
Find a screen that is mostly (or preferably all) black, and use this to adjust black level using the brightness control. Start by cranking it up until everything turns grey, and then back it down until that grey is invisible under ambient light, and then reduce it another step or so. The idea is that black should -always- be as black as possible under your typical lighting, but not so dark that shades of grey also become invisible.
After that, adjust the white level, otherwise known as "Contrast" or "Picture." Find or make a large (full-screen is nice) greyscale gradient, with consistant steps from white to black. This might be easier with a palletized 8-bit image, so that there's fewer levels of grey for your eye to discern. Turn up the contrast until the white end of this image loses its definition, and then turn it down until you see even steps of grey. No two strips should looks any closer to eachother in shade than any other two, ideally.
Double-check that your black level adjustment is sane, as changing the contrast will often interact with that. *sigh*
At this point, your monitor will probably look much darker than usual. It also is not overdriven anymore. This is not a coincidence.
The darkness is due to a CRT and the associated electronics are only capable of producing a certain amount of light. Ask it to do more of this, and it won't. This has the effect of pushing midtones up in luminosity, while flattening out the top end. This is not good for the electronics, or your eyes, as an overdriven white will not appear as sharply focused as one which is within the display's range of linearity.
Your display is now vastly more accurate than most others.
So. It is now time to adjust gamma, which will bring up midtones without overdriving things. There is, unlike NTSC, no standard gamma for PC displays, and thus there is no right or wrong way to do it.
It's easy to adjust gamma, provided that your video card and OS support it (xgamma under xfree86). Do a quick Google search for a gamma correction image - what you want is something with a checkerboard of small white and black squares, and a 50% grey box for comparison. Turn the gamma up until the checkerboard pattern matches the brightness of the box, and leave it there. You might find it helpful, depending on the image you use, to squint slightly and blur the checkerboard into something solid while adjusting this. Fortunately, since this happens digitally, there's no impact on any other adjustments, and you're done with it.
Your display should now appear glorious.
Next, color temperature. This is really the first step, but since most people -never- care about it, I put it last. Which doesn't make it unimportant, just neglected and largely unknown. An explanation is thus in order.
Color temperature represents the color of white. You've noticed that a white shirt appears differently under incandescent lights, or on a cloudy day, or in stark sunlight, or under harsh flourescents, or at a football game under metal halides -- even though, in all instances, the white shirt is still obviously white. This is color temperature. Metal halides, as used in stadiums, often have color temperature in excess of 15,000 Kelvin, which is largely blue. Incandescents are often as low as 4300k, which is yellow or brown (depending on your interpretation). The higher the number, the more blue it is. Lower, is more yellow/brown.
Like gamma, and also unlike NTSC (standard of 6500k) there's no standard color temperature for computer displays. I like my monitor at ~7000k, which to my eyes, looks like the sunlight that comes through my NW Ohio window as it appears on a sheet of paper.
Most monitors (and TVs alike, dispite the known, functional standard) have ghastly high color temperatures from the factory. This, as far as anyone can tell, is because of some human tendancy to think that a bluer picture is brighter, and thus better. Sony displays are notoriously blue out of the box.
I haven't seen a monitor sold in the past couple of years which did not allow adjustment of color temperature, and I also haven't seen one at all which has temperature presets which match reality. Ignore the presets.
So, first, you'll need to find a reference. A Kodak grey card and a lamp of known temperature would be nice. A color analyzer would be better, if one can be borrowed. Or, just use a sheet of plain white paper (not coated stock for inkjets) and ambient sunlight.
Use a full-screen image that's just plain white, or grey. You'll then tweak the individual gain of the red, green, and blue guns on your monitor until the displayed image matches the color (-not- brightness) of your reference. Alternate between white and grey images until you get as close a match as you can on each. Then (as this is the first step), go through and do all the other things mentioned above.
Done.
It will look darker again, but in reality, the light output hasn't been changed much by the temperature adjustment, but perception brightness has. Let it sit that way for a few days, and you'll soon look at other monitors with disdain.
Load up some pr0n, or fire up your favorite black-on-white application, and notice how much easier things are to read and discern. You'll see details in photographs that you positively couldn't before, because your monitor couldn't show them to you as it was stuck in "buy-me" mode, like a stereo turned up to 11.
If, after this rough calibration, you find that your monitor is overcome with glare, the obvious solution is to reduce ambient light. Don't try to turn up the monitor, because it can't do it. If you can't reduce the amount of light in the room, buy a new monitor. The one you have presently is aging, as vacuum tubes (particularly CRTs) tend to do, and it can't produce as much light as it used to be able to.