Black Point and White Saturation Test Images

[tomczak]

Black Point and White Saturation refer to how well you and your monitor can distinguish between v. dark pixels from black and v. bright pixels from white, and it depends on your monitor Contrast and Brightness settings, the intensity of ambient light, and the sensitivity of your vision. In my experience, not being able to see the difference for a few bottom and top levels is not such a big deal, but more than that will require monitor adjustment (or dimming the ambient light, or both). This has been discussed here, but I just want to record it in Tips for easy reference.

There are two nice and self-explanatory test images here:
http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/black.php
http://www.lagom.nl/lcd-test/white.php

Unlike Gamma test, they do not have to be viewed in 1:1, but it is better to download them and use them within PWP than in the browser.

In addition, PWP's Checkerboard Transformation is capable of displaying similar test images and you can use it interactively to find the threshold for the apparent (i.e. those that you can see) Black Point and White Saturation by adjusting the brightness of one of the checkerboard colours by one pixel value until you start seeing the difference between the Checkerboard squares using Ctrl-Shift-Click on the Colour Picker Brightness Slider.

These are the initial settings I use. The easiest way to do that is to save them from Checkerboard transformation and recall them as needed.

For the Black Point, set Preview Border Color to Black; for the White Saturation, set Preview Border Color to White.

The typical path for the Checkerboard settings files should be:
c:\Users\YOURNAME\Documents\Picture Window Pro\Checkerboard\

Black Point
checkerboard 0 ncols 8 nrows 8 cell_width 100 line_width 20 color1 10101 color2 0 line_color 0 dpi 100

White Saturation
checkerboard 0 ncols 8 nrows 8 cell_width 100 line_width 20 color1 fefefe color2 ffffff line_color ffffff dpi 100

They are also attached in ZIP file.

[tomczak]

This is an exaggeration of how the Checkerboard images will look like - in reality at the threshold of seeing, the differences between checkerboard squares should be barely perceptible.