Hi people, this past week i was setting up a new computer and took advantage right away and opened the "PUYA" Chop i've been working on on my laptop { http://www.autemo.com/forums/?t=3181&p=2 } and quickly realized the chop was way to dark. Now, i know this is nothing new, we all know that chops look different on diff monitors with dif settings etc. But how can we as a community help our choppers with this issue which i'm sure has hurt the final results of their work in the past. So to all those with the knowledge please share it with us and help me and maybe others out there who's work maybe getting affected by this.

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Monitor calibration is key.
It's able to be done easily within both Windows and OS X, 'm not so sure about Linux.
Quick searches of 'How to calibrate monitor', yield a bunch of results relating to it.
There are free online tools you can use to this. Most rely on your eyesight and personal judgment. So depending on your eyesight, this could be a good thing or it could be harmful.
You can also buy physical monitor calibrators with software to calibrate the monitor for you and take the guess work out.
An ideal monitor should display colours as they are shown in nature. And that is the whole idea behind calibration; display colours as they appear in real life.
The easiest and quickest way, rather than posting instructions here, is to do a search and use an online guide.
I've calibrated my two monitors, a 15 inch MacBook Pro IPS panel and a ViewSonic TN panel. They used to look worlds apart, but after calibration, the colour between the two is surprisingly similar. The MacBook Pro's colour is still more vivid because of the IPS panel, but the two can actually be used side by side now with little loss of accuracy.
Anyway, point of the story is that calibration gives you better and more consistent results.

+1,
but basically not many people use calibrated monitors
my personal choise - used my old CRT tuned to my preferences, put the new LCD on the left, cloned the view, and started messing with the settings
in the end i made it very usable for games & movies, and as for the photos - not so much, but it's a cheap TN anyways

a tip i picked up a long time ago which gives you a much better result (along with calibrating your monitor) is to set the colour preference in Adobe to "1998 Adobe RGB"

Old settings i know, but you'll be surprised how spot on they are

Where do you choose those settings?

edit > preferences > and its a tab in there somewhere

Cant find it:P
I use CS4 btw... (if that is relevant(?)

Monitor calibration is the first thing you should be doing if you are going to start producing (professional) quality visuals on your computer.

Technically choosing the Adobe RGB color profile doesn't do much on most monitors since most monitors don't have enough dynamic range to properly show the colors as they are in the profile information. Adobe RGB colors are much more brighter and deeper than conventional monitors are capable of showing. Instead it is converted into a kind of sRGB which is a lot more narrow than Adobe RGB. This doesn't really show up until you print it out. The colors aren't as vibrant as they were meant since you have been using the narrow sRGB colors in a wider Adobe RGB profile.

If you know you're going to make it viewed on a screen the safest way is to go with the sRGB color profile straight from the start.

iCandi if you're still wondering where the colour profiles for CS4 are, go to:
View > Proof Setup > Custom > Device to Simulate
From there you can choose the profile you prefer.

Thanks guys for sharing your knowledge it is much appreciated!
Personally I'm trying a couple things mentioned here and soon I'll have an update of my PUYA chop and I'll let you guys know so that you can tell me if all the tips I've applied worked.