I stupidly designed one of my new designs using a monitor with a higher than default vibrance rating, and now that I turn the virbance of my monitor back down to default the design looks somewhat dark, grey and washed out.
Here is the design:
www.simplisticstyle.com/new/
Can you please comment how the colouring looks on your monitor? Does it look washed out and dark? If yes, how do I go about increasing the vibrancy of all the layers in my PSD without having to alter each layer?
Looks absolutely ok on my calibrated 19" monitor and on my uncalibrated 21" monitor. As Slackr and AlexDawson correctly said, designing for web is not so precise as designing for print when you have a known hardware. Most of the users will have an uncalibrated monitor, so I guess you can sleep well 
Does not look so bad on my monitor, this is not my design monitor more so standard 17" office job. But from here its ok.
Thanks very much for your replies guys. I will take into account your advice, especially the contrast issue.
Yea the contrast between the text and background was all I was talking about. Contrast is usually concerned with the similarity or distance between light and dark points. If those two values are too similar or close together then they become harder to distinguish (meld into one another). You just need to make sure that there is enough between the foreground and background to ensure that the text is readable.
Because viewers of websites are inherently lazy you only get a few seconds were someone will evaluate whether they can be bothered reading what you have to say. Hence the importance of protecting text. Make it easy for them and make sure there are no barriers to their engaging with your content.
As for the colours, I like the contrast between the more muted background and the vibrant main window. If you saturate the background colours more I think you’ll take away from the prominent ‘voice’ this space has. Just my opinion.
Thanks a lot for your reply. In terms of the contrast issue, are you talking about the contrast between the text and the green background? If yes, I’ll take care if that, thanks a lot for the suggestion. Also how about the colouring, does it seem a bit grey? Could it do with some more saturation?
Yep Alex is totally right, the majority of users configurations will be all over the place. That is the main reason why the contrast issue is important, if the design contrast is high enough then, regardless of the screwy colours, the information/text should remain readable.
I’d say that by and large the amount of variation in screens has reduced due to the increased user base of people using photos. They’re less likely than in the past to have a wildly crazy screen because we’re all used to viewing family pics, work material on screens without green/blue/red skined people. Also much of the population are now using LCD screens which are typically set brighter.
This kind of issue is very common, though in addition to the above I would emphasise that no matter what you do, unfortunately very few people actually have their screens calibrated properly and they will therefore not see the exact same colors or vibrancy that you see. Many people know just enough about computers to turn the brightness up and down and that’s about it, so you’re likely to encounter customers who may find the visuals are washed out due to their own configuration. It’s a good thing you’re tweaking the colors to make them look natural and well contrasted within a good configuration (and the design does look fine as it stands), it’s just worth pointing out that there’s no real way to ensure everything looks perfect as there’s no telling to how screwed up the end users display might be!
Hi emkay, designing for the web is always going to involve an amount of guess work when you step outside the web-safe colours (not that this stops us). For what it is worth I’m viewing on a calibrated LCD monitor and the balance of light/dark is really good.
About the only thing that I would watch is the contrast in the bottom box that contains the text, make sure it isn’t too dark in the background colour. At the end of the day most websites are about conveying information and that primarily comes via text. So make sure you protect that readability at all costs.
That’s more a caution than recommendation, when you are dealing with all sorts of monitors out there in the real world you need to build in some tolerance for Joe Bloggs with the crazy settings.