Calibrating Monitor Question

Rick Harris · #8 07-13-2007, 08:28 AM

Andrew, sorry it took so long to respond to your reply but was out of town. Here's the results of the profile that I recently did: White Point: 6500K, White Lum: 134.66 cd/m2, Black Lum: .19 cd/m2, Gamma: 2.20.
Do you see anything there that would concern you? I want to also confirm my understanding of your reply - Are you saying that the brightness of my screen does not impact how light or dark my images will print and that I should just set it to what is comfortable for me to work with? Thanks for the continuing education.

AndrewRodney · #9 07-13-2007, 09:42 AM

The brightness of the display does not affect the output of the document. Not until you adjust the document based on what you're seeing.

NillToulme · #10 07-13-2007, 11:14 AM

...and therefore, this is an instance where it might be said that (unlike the rest of the calibration/profiling chain) you adjust your monitor to match your print, rather than vice versa (or, more precisely, rather than adjusting to a "standard"). Assuming that you otherwise have a properly calibrated color-managed workflow, if your prints look "too dark" compared to what you see on screen, especially if you're getting started with an LCD monitor, chances are you have your luminance set too high. 135 cd/m² might be OK in a very brightly lit office environment, but it would definitely be too bright in my workroom.

Nill

AndrewRodney · #11 07-13-2007, 11:30 AM

The print has to be viewed in some condition of course. Ideally that's a "5000K" Fluorescent lightbox (quotes on purpose), or something like a Solux mounted light. The luminance of the print condition and the display have to be set such that one doesn’t look brighter or darker than the other or you'll get a disconnect here when viewing the two. Then there's just the overall ambient light around the display. You want the lightest and darkest item in view to be the display. So, if you're in an office environment, you need a higher display luminance. Here's an advantage of LCD over CRT. The later can't produce a high luminance so you basically had to work in a dim cave like environment.

What we hope to achieve after setting up Photoshop's proof setup for paper white and ink black is the ability to view the display, then turn our heads 90 degrees, give a second or two to adapt to viewing the print under some standard illumination, and get the impression the two match. Of course, one's glowing phosphor's (or some Fluorescent backlit emissive display) while the other is a reflective print. The two ain't ever going to match! That would break the laws of physics. But we hope to see the two appear to produce a similar color appearance such that when we do edit the images on our displays, the results from the printer don't produce any surprises.

There's a lot more that can be done within Photoshop to make this all work but if you handle everything correctly, you can get a pretty good match between two very dissimilar medias.