ambient light when calibrating your monitor

<p>When calibrating my monitor (I'm using a 4 year old Spyder from Colorvision) should my room be completely dark i.e. done at night with no background lights on or done under the conditions I'm most likely to work (I usually work in a room with a small incandescent light (75 watts) on in the background. </p>

<p>Except at the extremely low end, monitor profiling devices are designed to effectively keep stray ambient light from being measured. Under normal circumstances, no special procedure is necessary.</p>

<p>Colin is right, but ambient light will affect your view of the display and that will affect your image editing. The most important thing is not to have any direct light shining on the screen, either artificial or natural. The usual suspects are overhead lights and daylight through windows. If you can't angle your monitor away from them, close the blinds and/or turn off the overheads. That doesn't mean the room has to be dark. I use a torchier floor lamp in the far corner of the room, and all the light is reflected from and diffused on the ceiling. The window is on the same wall as the monitor, so there's no direct daylight on the screen; however, bright daylight from there does affect my eyes, so I usually have the blinds at least partially closed.</p>

<p>The next most important thing is to calibrate the monitor in the same ambient light conditions that you will use when editing images, so that those conditions will be consistent for every editing session.</p>

<p>If you're using Spyder2 Pro, one of the later software versions has a routine for evaluating ambient light conditions and including the results in the calibration process. I've only used it once, to determine that my lighting was within acceptable parameters, but never used it in the calibration results. I think the only reason for doing that would be if you have some really bad lighting conditions which you can't control, such as in an office run by a pointy-haired boss... </p>

<p>if calibrating, the room light should be a constant, and the same amount that you work at the pc in. i have my pc in a room with a 4 lite overhead fixture, and when i am working at the pc day or night that fixture is on. it is plenty for reading a book. you normally would not watch tv in a dark room, why would you look at the monitor in a dark room? my calibration software has an ambienent light measuring device, but i never use it. the light in the room is always a constant amount.</p>

<p>what is important is that you use the same standard settings as everyone else uses. these are temp 6500 gamma 2.2 and monitor brightness 120cdls(100if crt). if you use other standrad settings then noone else will see what you do in your images. and you could never send the images to a web printing place since they use the standard settings and what they print would always be different from you. if you are in a room that is much dimmer than normal then you might end up thinking nthat your momnktor iat 120 is too bright and turn down the brightness. it is not you are just viewing the monitor in a too dim room.</p>

<p>IF the room is completely dark expect for the display, you have no intention of viewing prints or soft proofing for an print output that results in a match? </p>