QuickGamma is a small utility program to calibrate a monitor on the fly without having to buy expensive hardware tools.

The relationship between the input signal and the luminance of a monitor is not linear but exponential with gamma being the exponent. A gamma value of 2.2 has become the de facto standard in Windows, the Internet and the digital photography. This means that only monitors with a gamma value of 2.2 will produce a correct output. Despite the fact that the gamma values of monitors have improved over the years, many monitors still have a gamma value that deviates more or less from 2.2. A correction is therefore required to achieve optimal results. The monitor gamma can easily be corrected to 2.2 using QuickGamma. More information and detailed instructions on how to use QuickGamma are available by pushing the Help button in QuickGamma.

QuickGamma is free for personal use and can be downloaded here!

• Terms of Usage

  • QuickGamma consists of the program QuickGamma.exe, the help file QuickGamma.chm and the printable help file QuickGamma.pdf. All the constituent parts of QuickGamma are Copyright Protected. They are not Public Domain Software, but free of charge for private use. Any commercial use requires a written consent by the author.

    QuickGamma with all its constituent parts may be installed and used on any suitable computer for private use and may be distributed freely as long as these conditions are met:

    1. QuickGamma is distributed as complete and unaltered installation package.
    2. Distributing single constituent parts of QuickGamma is not permitted.
    3. The distributed QuickGamma installation package is free of any charge.

• Warranty Disclaimer

  • The author gives no warranties, either expressed or implied, that this software is fit for a particular purpose, or will perform adequately at all times. This software is licensed "as is", and so you (the user) are assuming the full risk of using it. If this software causes any damage in any way, then you must bear the full burden of the damage caused.

QuickGamma Version 4 does not work on any Windows versions prior to Windows 7 and consists of the program QuickGamma.exe, the help file QuickGamma.chm and the printable help file QuickGammaHilfe.pdf. All other files that have been part of previous versions of QuickGamma are not required anymore because QuickGamma Version 4 now utilizes the Windows 7 Display Calibration feature.

Microsoft has introduced a new feature called Windows Display Calibration into Windows 7. Detailed information about how to use the Display Calibration can be found at https://windows.microsoft.com/en-US/windows7/Change-color-management-settings. Besides offering a visual calibration wizard, this feature supplies a LUT loader, which automatically loads the LUT at system start up and whenever else the LUT needs to be reloaded (after waking from Standby or Hibernate for instance). The LUT is a hardware based Look Up Table in the graphics card and provides a means of input value to output value mapping for the RGB pixel values and thus can be used to implement a Monitor Gamma correction.

Apple has been using the LUT since many years for its operating system built in color management. In fact, Apple has registered the private ICC Profile tag video card gamma table (vcgt) with the International Color Consortium (ICC). This tag is used in a dedicated Monitor Profile and holds the gamma values, which are then loaded into the LUT by a loader program.

Hardware based Monitor Calibration Systems also use the vcgt tag, which in this case contains the correction data to achieve the monitor calibration. Because Windows did not provide a LUT loader, each calibration program had to provide its own LUT loader program. This was working fine for quite some time until Windows came up with Standby and Hibernation. Unfortunately, the LUT loader programs were unable to cope with those Windows features and thus the LUT was reset each time when resuming from Standby or Hibernate.

To make things worse, the graphics card manufacturers came up with programs that were installed along with the graphics card driver and allowed the user to play with colors and gamma. These programs were also resetting the graphics card LUT at system startup, which caused a race condition with the LUT loaders of a Hardware based Monitor Calibration Systems. The program that was loading the LUT last won...

Things changed when Windows 7 came along and provided its built in calibration loader, which not only loads the LUT at system start up, but also takes care of Standby and Hibernate.

All it takes to utilize the Windows 7 LUT loader is to install a Monitor Profile with a vcgt tag containing the LUT data and to make this profile the default profile for the respective monitor. Because such a profile is not available by default, the Windows 7 Display Calibration feature is not active by default and must be activated manually.

The visual calibration wizard included in Windows 7 could be used for display calibration, but the images used for the visual calibration are not suited for the job. This is where QuickGamma Version 4 comes into play. QuickGamma Version 4 still contains Norman Koren's excellent gamma images, but now creates a monitor profile with a vcgt tag containing the LUT data. The profile is automatically installed, defined as the default profile for the monitor and the Windows 7 Display Calibration feature is automatically enabled. There is no need for any supporting programs anymore because QuickGamma Version 4 is all it takes to achieve a good visual monitor gamma calibration.

• Download QuickGamma

  • Download QuickGamma V4 from this webpage.

    

• QuickGamma Checksums

  • The following checksum ensures that the downloaded version of QuickGamma is indeed an unaltered original version.

    SHA-256:

    1f97a012ab0206c739a584f8b59a1842a629b30721c5e98ed1344df810b1118a

• Download Runtime Libraries

  • QuickGamma requires the 32 Bit runtime libraries mfc100u.dll and msvcr100.dll to be installed. These libraries are part of the "Visual Studio C++ 2010 SP1 redistribution package", which can be directly downloaded from Microsoft.

    

• Installation

  • If a previous version of QuickGamma is currently installed, open that version and write down the Red, Green and Blue gamma values. Uninstall the previous version before installing QuickGamma Version 4. If you do not uninstall the previous version of QuickGamma then all parts of the prevous version that are not part of the new version will still exist. Besides some files, a number of unused Registry entries will still exist. Once the new version has been installed, open it and set up the previously written down Red, Green and Blue gamma values. Make sure to read the new help file. There are quite some changes in QuickGamma Version 4 compared with previous versions.

    To install QuickGamma, simply open the downloaded QuickGamma installation file. If the required Runtime Libraries are not yet installed, download the Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable Package (see link above) and install it by opening the downloaded installation file. That's all, QuickGamma is now ready to use.

• Support QuickGamma

  • Please support the QuickGamma project with a small donation. Any amount is greatly appreciated, just think about it how much QuickGamma is worth to you personally.