I do not have a "quality" monitor, which must make it rather difficult to really see what everyone else sees. I spent most of the day today manually calibrating it, what a pain. Anyway, I had downloaded the 21 step wedge from Katerine Eisman's support site for people who have bought her books (I own 2 of them). I could not get my monitor to see the variation between 100 and 95 no matter what I did!

Finally, I created my own 21 shade step wedge and I can see all of the shades quite nicely. I want to share it here because I'm wondering if everyone else can see all of the shades too. I double-checked each stage using the 'info' tool in photoshop too and it's all good.

I know my monitor needs another calibration, so I took a look.

I can see them all clearly except 1-2, with 3 being difficult.

You've confirmed it, my old monitor needs help :)

You know what? I've put my stepwedge as my monitor's background image, got rid of the pretty pics 'cuz I want to know that what I'm seeing is accurate. Anyway, as the background image for my monitor, I can clearly distinguish between 1&2 and all of the others, but, in this thread, opening up my jpg, there's little difference between 1&2. I'm wondering why there would be a difference in what my browser (firefox) displays as opposed to what I see as my monitor's background image.

Hmmm... I think my brain needs a rest... time for a hot toddy.

when i open this at work on a EIZO CG241, ACR indicates that step 1 is clipping so i'm not sure this is the best image to use for monitor calibration, at home on my diamondtron crt i had to brighten my display in order to see 1&2 differently...

Glad that I'm not the only one. I can clearly see the 10 steps in the RetouchPro logo, so maybe my monitor isn't that off.

Interesting. I have a very new ViewSonic monitor, and it is calibrated. I can't see a difference between 1 & 2, and barely see 3. If I check 1 and 2 with photoshop, I can see 1 has RGB values of 0, and 2 has RGB values of 12.

I think I figured out why we can't see 1-2 clearly.
Optical illusion. The white letters are infering.

I layered the same art 3 times so as to increase the
space between the white numbers and the steps.
Now I can see them all clearly.

Interesting, huh?

Photoshop: Note also that Photoshop has color management and browsers don't. That must have a lot to do with it also.

Bill, I think that you are correct. I made a large square block out of the image, and completely hid the numbers so they would not interfere with my vision. Now I can clearly see all of the steps with no problem.

i don't think it's an illusion, i saw it right away at work but that is on a very expensive monitor...