Are you going to be using this monitor for color critical situations, or are you just trying to get it set up so it has acceptably natural color, brightness and contrast and is easy on the eyes?
I'll guess that it's the later, because LCDs aren't good for pre-press color work. I work with color calibrated monitors everyday at work, and the most we'd use an LCD for is as a palette monitor or for page layouts.
If you're just trying to get natural color, I think Sean makes an interesting suggestion. I've always had a mental separation between what I do at work and my audio and video systems at home, but using the Video Essentials on your computer monitor may do the trick.
Have you tried the two presets and what was the result? If they are temperature settings for 5000 kelvin and 6500 kelvin, you'd probably want to set that first before adjusting brigthness and contrast. The tempertature settings will influence the brightness and contrast settings. I use 5000K at work, but for general use 6500K might be better. I have a Barco RefCal at work that has a built-in colorimeter and calibration software, so I dont' even have to think about these things any more. The Radius Pressview I use at home has a detachable colorimeter, but with the older software all the brightness and contrast settings had to be done manually and by eye.
If there is any way to reset your monitor to it's default settings do so. Check to see also if your monitor allows you to set the gamma. A gamma setting of 1.8 is usual for rmost work, especially print work. Anything higher is usually for the web or TV. Pe3046 gives good advice about starting at 100% and working your way down. Sometimes, the default settings for brightness will be set at 100%. That's how it worked with the Pressview. Start with brightness first and back it down until it's comfortable for you without losing too much detail on your screen. Next take a look at contrast. Sometimes it has a middle setting which allows you to retrieve any brightness lost when you backed down it down. Make sure not to over do it as to lose detail in the highlights and shadows.
Adjusting RGB can be a tricky thing. Values range from 0-255. 0 being darkest and 255 being lightest. When working through Adobe Photoshop sometimes to remove color casts I set the curves midtone to a value of 128 for all three colors and click it on a medium gray. A way this might help you is bring up a document on your screen that you know has a neutral gray even if isn't medium gray and adjust your RGB so the gray looks neither warm or cool. Try to make small moves. Reducing the value of the red channel will actually make the image look redder, while reducing blue. Adding red will do the opposite. Reducing green will make the image look greener or yellower. Increasing green will have the opposite effect. And reducing the blue channel will make the image look bluer and slightly more red, while reducing yellow. Very confusing, but something to keep in mind when you start moving all those slidders or turning those knobs and aren't sure why the colors are getting all out of wack.
Hopefully you won't need to go through all of this and Sean's idea works the best. Good luck.
