Luminous Landscape Forum

Raw & Post Processing, Printing => Colour Management => Topic started by: ralph257 on March 02, 2017, 02:02:57 pm

Title: Surrounding Ambient light for editing
Post by: ralph257 on March 02, 2017, 02:02:57 pm
What would be the optimum surrounding light for editing ?
Should i have 2 monitor profiles
One for day
One for night lights on ?
Title: Re: Surrounding Ambient light for editing
Post by: Doug Gray on March 02, 2017, 03:13:20 pm
What would be the optimum surrounding light for editing ?
Should i have 2 monitor profiles
One for day
One for night lights on ?

Mostly, you want the ambient light to be low enough that it has little effect on your adaptation to white. A secondary reason is that it's good to minimize glare from ambient reflections. I use 100 cd/m^2 for the monitor and about 60 lux ambient impacting the screen. However, the room ambient is about 100 lux at 3000K. That probably isn't optimal but I don't find it affects things too much as the monitor gray surround is brighter.

However, the brightness of surround is important. One perceives smaller changes in tone which are near the surround as larger than the same changes which are removed from the surround. This perceptual difference can change how you adjust a photo.

I have a 31" monitor and so I typically use a middle gray background and, if an image is to be displayed with a white border I'll put an appropriately sized background white layer to simulate how it will appear.  OTOH, if a print is to be displayed with a flood against a darker wall w/o a white border I'll work with a dark gray background and no white layer.

I can't comment about day/night. My room has a curtained, small, North facing window so there is little difference.
Title: Re: Surrounding Ambient light for editing
Post by: Tim Lookingbill on March 02, 2017, 04:39:06 pm
Here's my setup that's been working for over 5 years.

I have block out curtains covering my windows, 27in. LED LG IPS display calibrated to 6500K, 100cd/m2 and installed in lamp two T8 18in. Philips "Natural Light" 5000K 92cri flotubes $9 each at Home Depot.

The print shown is off a Walmart Fuji Frontier DL600 dry lab (inkjet) printer set to sRGB/auto enhance turned off.