Screen brightness while Photo Editing?

Clonyn

Taken that your monitor is fully colour calibrated for your photo editing what "brightness" setting do you have your monitor at?
What Iam concerned with is the affect my monitor brightness will have on a finished edit if I feel that I need to either increase or decrease the exposure on the image Iam editing, in other words I might feel that I need to decrease exposure but this might be because of the screen brightness of the monitor itself.
I hope this question makes sense

flyingsnail

Does you calibrator not also set your brightness? mine does and usually ends up at about 125 (cant remember what the units are called) but it also takes into account the ambient light. It is up about the 90% mark of the brightness setting for the monitor.

Heebie

If you own a calibration device, and have calibrated your screen, then it should be calibrated. Ideally the lighting in the room while you're editing should be the same as it was when you calibrated the screen. Any change it lighting will change perception of the colours on the screen at least slightly.
If your calibrator is good, it will be taking the ambient light in the room into account, and should instruct you in what to do about brightness (including turning off the automatic brightness control on laptops etc..)
If you didn't run a calibration on your screen, it's not actually properly calibrated even if the documentation for the monitor says it is. It may have come with a colour profile that puts it somewhere in the right ballpark, but that's not the same thing.
Don't forget that if output devices aren't also calibrated, what you see on your screen us unlikely to be the same as what comes out on the printer, and it will likely look different on other screens, especially if you use a large colour space when editing (AdobeRGB or Kodak ProPhoto for examples) For output to cheap monitors a generic sRGB is probably what you want for the output profile.

Clonyn

Recently purchased a Dell Inspiron with a 4K resolution 3840 X 2160 screen what calibrating system do you use?

flyingsnail

I use the spyder 4 pro, I think the current version is now the spyder 5

Paulw

A properly calibrated monitor will have brightness included in the calibration.

But, monitors need to be recalibrated over time too, since they change.

Something along the lines of -
initial calibration (after you buy it)
1 week recalibration
1 month recalibration
3 month recalibration
6 month recalibration
1 year recalibration
etc

Monitors change over the months from when you buy them. Most of the new calibrators (like Spyder) also judge ambient light too, to keep the colours consistent.

frozenfrozen

peak white should be 80cd2, which is very dim but there you go.


use waveforms and histogram to get your brightness right

Heebie

I currently use a ColorMunki, but I've used the I1 system before to calibrate screens, printers, and scanners. That was for a professional production environment, though. The ColorMunki I find adequate for home/hobbyist use.
I've only ever used Spyder for calibrating screens, and not in a very long time.