A short list for testing whether your monitor is doing its job

People sometimes email us saying a wallpaper "looks washed out" or "shows banding". Nine times out of ten it's the monitor, not the file. A short list, in the order we'd run it ourselves:

1. Colour temperature. Default factory presets often ship at 9300K (cold blue) because it makes the panel look "brighter" in showroom lighting. For real-world viewing, set to 6500K (D65). Almost every wallpaper we ship is graded for D65.
2. HDR off when previewing SDR files. Our packs ship as SDR JPG. If your monitor is forcing HDR upscaling, it'll crush highlights and look muddy. Toggle HDR off, view, then on again, compare.
3. Bit depth. If you're seeing banding in skies, your panel might be running 6-bit + FRC instead of true 8-bit. Check your driver settings.
4. sRGB mode (or P3 if you're on a wide-gamut display). Photos graded in sRGB displayed under a "Native" wide-gamut profile look oversaturated.
5. Wallpaper compression. Some operating systems re-compress wallpapers when you set them. Open the JPG in a viewer first to confirm the file itself is clean before blaming us.

If after all that the file still looks wrong, email us with a screenshot. We've replaced files for genuine grading mistakes more than once.