Confused about monitor brightness

[keith_plechaty]

<p>I'm quite confused about how to use my Eye-One Calibrator. I've owned a cinema display for about 3 years now, and I calibrated the monitor with the eye one. But I never quite grasped what I am suppose to do about the brightness of the display. I like my monitor turned up to the max brightness because it looks incredibly dark to me when turned down. Is it bad to have it turned up all the way like this? Does it make my prints inaccurate? I mostly make photo books, and I am wondering if this is compromising the quality at all? What happens if my monitor is too bright? Will my printouts just look too dark since my monitor is set too bright? If I do turn down my monitor brightness, should I do it when the software asks me to do so?That would be right before it does the calibration. I usually choose a 120 CDM setting, and yet I just leave my monitor at the max brightness. Does this invalidate the color of my photos when printing?</p>

[rffffffff]

<p>I think that this depends a lot on ambient light, but I could be wrong. I work in an office with heavy blinds most of the time and keep the room fairly consistent so its hard to tell for me...<br>

but...</p>

<p>If you are printing black and whites and the brightness of the screen is off, you are going to get over or underexposed pictures in print, most likely. Color seems to have a little more flexibility in judging exposure, to me at least, but even there an overly bright monitor will cause problems.</p>

<p>I would suggest turning it down to 120 and seeing how it looks compared to prints. I hated the 'dark' monitor when I first calibrated too, but I got completely used to it over a short period of time.</p>

[joe_c5]

<p>I can think of three possible downsides and one possible upside of having an LCD monitor set too bright.</p>

<p>One downside is exactly what you described, that prints will not look as bright as the monitor does unless they are viewed under very bright light. The colors should still be correct, just brighter on the monitor than the prints. But since you are calibrating the monitor and setting the calibration software to 120 cd/m2, your monitor is probably not ending up too bright when you are finished. I don't know the exact details of the Eye-One software, but similar software will just lower the brightness in the video card instead.</p>

<p>Another is that if you are setting the calibration software to 120 cd/m2 without turning the monitor brightness down to roughly this level (or down as low as it goes if the brightness does not go down that far) then you may be giving up some of the possible shades that were brighter than 120 cd/m2. If the backlight is turned down so that white is only a bit over 120 cd/m2, then the LCD panel can use more of its full number of colors.</p>

<p>The last is that turning down the monitor brightness probably makes black darker, whereas lowering the brightness in the video card cannot change black.</p>

<p>A possible upside to leaving the monitor brightness high and having the calibration software lower it is that on some LCD monitors the brightest whites can be more prone to weird color shifts when viewed from off axis. If the software sets the video card not to use the brightest whites, then you won't see this color shift happening. I sort of doubt the cinema displays are prone to this anyway.</p>

 

[maxmalossini]

<p>I have a similar problem: colors in prints are not affected by brightness settings of your monitor, BUT the brightness of the print definitely is (esp. bw), and can be so frustrating.<br>

"Solution": for photo editing I have to keep my Samsung at 0 (yes, zero) brightness, and also I have to work in very dim ambient light. Only by doing so my prints come out to look like they are on the monitor, otherwise they tend to be too dark. My monitor is calibrated, but I guess the calibration software does not modify brightness ( I use the cheaper spyder2). Even if I were to use a more expensive software all it would do is to make the brightness of the lcd monitor down to zero.<br>

Luckily I found a working solution, though I don't like it so much.</p>

[kari v]

<blockquote>

<p>Does it make my prints inaccurate?</p>

</blockquote>

<p>Have a look. Does it? No reason to find solutions to a problem you perhaps don't have.</p>

[keith_plechaty]

<p>Thanks to everyone for their answers. I'm going to try and keep my monitor at 120 cd/m2 for a few days to see if it makes much of a difference. I've been printing photo books for 2 years now with the monitor set to full brightness. I don't think I really had any problems. I'm thinking I just got use to it that way and adjusted my pics accordingly. But I want to use my Eye-One to the fullest, so I am going to try and keep my monitor turned down to see how things go. I didn't realize I was hurting my LCD by keeping it at full brightness all the time. I kind of feel bad about that now.</p>

[joe_c5]

<p>You would not have been damaging the monitor by leaving it at full brightness, if that is what you mean by “hurting.”</p>

[keith_plechaty]

<p>Yes, I thought I was somehow damaging it because everyone keeps saying to me that leaving it at full brightness burns out the monitor faster. But I have left it at 100% brightness for over 3 years without a problem!</p>

[joe_c5]

<p>Running at higher brightness may wear out the fluorescent bulbs faster, but before they burn out completely they will just get dimmer. They are probably designed to last tens of thousands of hours before getting too dim to be useful.</p>

[keith_plechaty]

<p>I guess since it's something I can't undo, I shouldn't overly worry about it. But now that I know, I'll keep it in mind. I'm going to attempt to do as the pros do and keep things around 120 if possible.</p>