Judging Screen brightness for Prints (Help)!

[darrellishere]

High their, this probably a common sense question but I'm going to be getting allot of poster prints and iphoto books done and was wondering, what display brightness to have my led display set to in-order to proper judge how bright the prints will be.

Im using Adobe RGB color space and currently have my display set 4/5 bars of brightness. Is this too low?/High? I realize prints don't have a backlight behind them.

Dose anyone have experience with this, how their prints have come out. Cheers darrell

[a350]

Calibrate your monitor.

http://epaperpress.com/monitorcal/index.html

[Maxxamillian]

One of the most important pieces in your kit....your monitor. Do some research and get a monitor that you can calibrate. Loads of threads on this topic (just do a search).

Good luck!

[Ruahrc]

You should not be using the AdobeRGB color space as your monitor color space. You should be using a color space that was designed for your monitor (be it the one that came with the computer, one you "eyeball" calibrated using the built in display calibrator in OS X, or preferably one you made using a hardware calibrator)

Technically if you wanted to be very strict about it you would calibrate your monitor to the brighness and color temperature settings of your intended viewing environment. However, as a general rule most calibrators recommend you calibrate the display brightness to 120cd/m^2. None of us can tell you how many brightness bars on your monitor that is since everybody's screen will be slightly different.

Ruahrc

[toxic]

make a test print and lower your brightness so it matches. it's probably the lowest setting, or close to it.

[ChrisA]

High their, this probably a common sense question but I'm going to be getting allot of poster prints and iphoto books done and was wondering, what display brightness to have my led display set to in-order to proper judge how bright the prints will be.

Brightness does not matter. Your prints are not backlit or self-luminous like a monitor is. Set the monitor only bright enough that you can see the difference between black and the next closest shade of gray. You need a test image for this.

Far more important is getting the COLOR calibrated so your whites don't come out pink, green or blue. You need to create a custom profile for your monitor. This has to be re-done every 6 or 8 weeks, monitors slowly age. For that there is no other option then and buy and use a hardware colorimeter. They have become affordable, well under $100 now. This is a sensor that hangs in front of the screen and measures the color. You can try and "eyeball" it but unless you have spent a long time doing color calibration work your eye are not well trained enough

I have one of these and it works well on my 24" iMac. Works best if I turn down the room light and semi-darken the room while it runs
http://www.amazon.com/ColorVision-Spyder2-Express-Win-Mac/dp/B000ES4PYU/ref=dp_cp_ob_e_title_3

They make other models but the only difference is the software, you don't need it.

[Abstract]

1. Calibrate your monitor.

Uh....that's it.


If you don't buy one, then my best advice with regards to "what you see is what you get" (WYSIWYG) is to trust your histogram rather than what you see on the screen. Take a look at how far over the "peaks" in the histogram are to the right side. I think that eventually, you'll learn to look at the shape of the histogram, understand where the histogram is balanced, and know where to centre it (probably at the centre (50%) of the histogram, or 75% towards the right edge (25% away from the right edge).

[darrellishere]

Thanks for all the replies they are really helpful!