What room lighting is best for photo editing and print proofing?
Asked 4/3/2016
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If my monitor is calibrated and I use a viewing box for prints, what ambient room lighting should I use for editing? A completely dark room feels too harsh, but my current 6500K bulb is very bright and causes screen reflections. Should I use a dimmer bulb at the same color temperature, or is there a better setup for the room itself?
Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
Photography Stack Exchange contributor
10y ago
2 Answers
6
You don't need a dimmer bulb, you just need to disperse it properly so that it is more evenly distributed throughout the room. Rather than placing the bulb where it is shining directly on your monitor, place it in a fixture and bounce it off the neutrally colored walls and/or ceiling so the light is fairly uniform throughout the room.
The standard for viewing photos on a monitor is D50 (broad spectrum light with all of the components, including UV, carefully controlled and centered on 5000K). For LCD monitors the intensity of the ambient light as measured at the center of the screen should be 55 Lux. The monitor should also be calibrated to D50. Recommended maximum brightness with an LCD monitor is 120 cd/mm². For a CRT it is 100 cd/mm².
There are many in the graphics industry that prefer to use D65, which is centered on 6500K, for monitors. This is perfectly acceptable as long as the monitor and the ambient lighting match. However, care must be taken not to allow the 6500K ambient light to affect the perception of the D50 light source illuminating prints in your print viewing booth. In the case of a small print viewing box, you would need to turn off any non D50 lighting when critically evaluating photo prints. Otherwise you risk metameric failure.
Metamerism is when two objects render different spectral power distributions yet visually match under a certain lighting/viewing condition, but not under another. Two objects that visually match under at least one lighting condition are called a metameric pair. When two objects match under one light source/viewing condition but not under another, the resulting condition is called metameric failure.
Originally by user15871. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0
user15871
10y ago
0
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Use soft, indirect, neutral ambient light rather than a bright bulb shining into the room or onto the screen. The main goal is even illumination with minimal reflections and no strong color cast.
Good practice from the answers:
- Avoid direct light on the monitor.
- Put the lamp in a fixture and bounce light off neutral walls or the ceiling for more uniform room lighting.
- Keep walls white or a very neutral light gray so they don’t tint your perception.
- Match the room light reasonably well to your workflow white point: many setups use 6500K, while print/viewing standards are often based on D50/5000K.
- If your current lamp is causing glare, either dim it, move it farther away, or diffuse it better.
So yes: a dimmer bulb can help, but the bigger improvement is light placement and diffusion. A lower-intensity, indirect daylight-balanced source is usually more comfortable and more accurate than a single bright exposed bulb.
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