Well, i may seem pretty dense for just figuring this out, but hopefully this will help out all the rest of you who, like me, were to dense to figure out why your mac's screen looked kind of washed out.

no need to calibrate most of the time, what you need to do is adjust the contrast. i knew that nice little fact for months, as for how to do it, that's my recent discovery.

~How to adjust contrast~

Turn it up: ctrl+alt+command+. (period)
Turn it down: ctrl+alt+command+, (comma)

they come set to the lowest contrast as default.