I have a CRT that's properly calibrated and a Geforce 7600.
The pics look too dark on my system, and it's no wonder. If I load the pic into photoshop and look at the levels, it shows most of the colors are below 64, and fully half of them are below 32!
I adjusted the image close to what I think you meant to achieve on my monitor:
It will probably look much too bright on yours.
Btw,a properly calibrated monitor will have the contrast turned all the way up, and the brightness turned down until just before the darkest shade of gray becomes indistinguishable from the normal black background. So make yourself a 1,1,1 gray square and stick that in the middle of a black background and view that full screen and adjust your monitor with it.
If you still have problems you might be running adobe gamma and that might have screwed up settings. It's a peice of crap that program. No way to go back to the defaults, and it affects itself, so if you run it after having used it once, the second run will produce different results!
The pics look too dark on my system, and it's no wonder. If I load the pic into photoshop and look at the levels, it shows most of the colors are below 64, and fully half of them are below 32!
I adjusted the image close to what I think you meant to achieve on my monitor:
It will probably look much too bright on yours.
Btw,a properly calibrated monitor will have the contrast turned all the way up, and the brightness turned down until just before the darkest shade of gray becomes indistinguishable from the normal black background. So make yourself a 1,1,1 gray square and stick that in the middle of a black background and view that full screen and adjust your monitor with it.
If you still have problems you might be running adobe gamma and that might have screwed up settings. It's a peice of crap that program. No way to go back to the defaults, and it affects itself, so if you run it after having used it once, the second run will produce different results!