In the olden days, you set the brightness of your display and left it there. Nowadays, you might change the brightness of your built in display by accident (thanks, control bar!)

I pretend to be a photographer once in a while and I'm curious how pros deal with this. Seems like having a random brightness setting could be maddening.

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It can be a bit maddening if you don't go through a few tests..

And a lot depends on whether you're printing or editing for the web.

For the Web, it can be a crap shoot as far brightness and color..Once you have some kind of calibration setup (manual step by step mac thingy) You just try to view your final results on as many different devices as you can to check things,.phone, tablet, laptop desktop..if you have access to multiple devices....Sometimes I work in an sRGB calibration... but i often forget to switch over... most of the time things turn out ok.

Printing is different tho..ideally you want your monitor brightness (in a good calibration) to match your print viewing area..color temp is also important and somewhat driven by preference..I prefer mine to be a more traditional 'less cool' space...close to typical gallery lighting, 3500k plus or minus. My viewing area is setup to feel like a typical gallery situation so my monitor brightness /luminance when im profiling tends to be around 90 cd/m2.

If you go through the manual calibration process on your MAC it'll get you in the ballpark..it's not gonna give you a real critical calibration but it'll get you close enough for web work..i would never use that manual calibration it for critical printing.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 02/08/2019 10:17PM by Kraniac.