Extremely confused about monitor brightness and printing.

For a long while I was not working with a calibrated monitor and I never printed photos. I now do a lot of print work for clients and so I calibrated using a Calibrite DisplayPro HL. Calibrite's own software acts very buggy on my computer and often won't even finish, so I did the actual calibration with DisplayCal. Either way, colors seem reasonable.

Brightness is proving to be a large problem. Both Calibrite and DisplayCal's software put the brightness I was using at about 200 nits. Still, many - but not all - photos I edited before calibration print fine. When calibrating, I lowered brightness to 120 as this is in the range of what is considered correct for printing.

The result is that everything looks very dark. I'll review photos on the camera LCD and they look great, but loading into the computer they look extremely dark and, more importantly, if I try to increase the exposure compensation (in LrC or any other editor) they start to look awful and blown out. I spent several weeks where for every photo I spent an a half hour meticulously fine tuning exposure, highlights, shadows, blacks, and whites, all with a great deal of masking, just to get well lit photos that look good on the camera to look halfway decent. "This can't be right," I kept thinking.

One day I took photos of my kids and I thought they were really well lit on scene, but then I could not get anything that was even remotely decent on the computer. Finally I turned the monitor back up to 200 nits and they look good again, roughly like on the camera. I know this is much, much higher than is considered correct for printing, but at lower brightnesses these photos that look well lit and nice on camera look completely unusably dark on the PC. Here are a few examples, unedited, except for the last one):







Unfortunately most of the really good examples are photos I don't have releases for.

Of these photos, the very warm one in the forest is the best example of one that at 120 nits or even 140 looks far, far too dark, but I can't really brighten it up in any way without things starting to blow out. At 200 nits it looks just about right to me.

When printing many (but not all) photos which look good on the monitor - and, for what it's worth, the camera - are just too dark. They're not usually terribly awfully, unusably dark, but they're darker than they ought to be and darker than you'd expect from something you've paid for.

I'm at a loss as to what to do here. I am considering replacing the monitor as this monitor is by design a gaming monitor - it is an approximately 6 month old LG Ultragear 24" monitor. I know a more photocentric monitor would be better, but how dramatic of a difference can I expect from a monitor that will measure on a calibration device the same brightness as this one?
More generally, please help me understand what is going on here so I can get the brightness sorted out here.

SCoombs said:

For a long while I was not working with a calibrated monitor and I never printed photos. I now do a lot of print work for clients and so I calibrated using a Calibrite DisplayPro HL. Calibrite's own software acts very buggy on my computer and often won't even finish, so I did the actual calibration with DisplayCal. Either way, colors seem reasonable.

Brightness is proving to be a large problem. Both Calibrite and DisplayCal's software put the brightness I was using at about 200 nits. Still, many - but not all - photos I edited before calibration print fine. When calibrating, I lowered brightness to 120 as this is in the range of what is considered correct for printing.

The result is that everything looks very dark. I'll review photos on the camera LCD and they look great, but loading into the computer they look extremely dark and, more importantly, if I try to increase the exposure compensation (in LrC or any other editor) they start to look awful and blown out. I spent several weeks where for every photo I spent an a half hour meticulously fine tuning exposure, highlights, shadows, blacks, and whites, all with a great deal of masking, just to get well lit photos that look good on the camera to look halfway decent. "This can't be right," I kept thinking.

One day I took photos of my kids and I thought they were really well lit on scene, but then I could not get anything that was even remotely decent on the computer. Finally I turned the monitor back up to 200 nits and they look good again, roughly like on the camera. I know this is much, much higher than is considered correct for printing, but at lower brightnesses these photos that look well lit and nice on camera look completely unusably dark on the PC. Here are a few examples, unedited, except for the last one):







Unfortunately most of the really good examples are photos I don't have releases for.

Of these photos, the very warm one in the forest is the best example of one that at 120 nits or even 140 looks far, far too dark, but I can't really brighten it up in any way without things starting to blow out. At 200 nits it looks just about right to me.

When printing many (but not all) photos which look good on the monitor - and, for what it's worth, the camera - are just too dark. They're not usually terribly awfully, unusably dark, but they're darker than they ought to be and darker than you'd expect from something you've paid for.

I'm at a loss as to what to do here. I am considering replacing the monitor as this monitor is by design a gaming monitor - it is an approximately 6 month old LG Ultragear 24" monitor. I know a more photocentric monitor would be better, but how dramatic of a difference can I expect from a monitor that will measure on a calibration device the same brightness as this one?
More generally, please help me understand what is going on here so I can get the brightness sorted out here.

Click to expand...

FWIW and my view of what you say

I found the about your current monitor

https://www.lg.com/uk/monitors/gami...py17TEtUKadz6iqX1qYSK5mYApQHVUSIsxrQ_xWLFW7E0

It is a VA screen and the only gamut mentioned is NTSC (a TV based gamut) of 72% it may be great for gaming but IMO crap for any serious photo editing and even worse for a planned output of printing.

I have no idea if any sort of calibration would give you a meaningful profile!

Please look for an IPS screen with at the very least a >95% sRGB and if you can afford it if the gamut includes >95% aRGB as well.

Put simply a properly calibrated screen that I describe above calibrated to 80 to 90 cd/m2 should put you in range of getting prints that match very closely to what you see on screen.

NB too dark a print in almost 100% of the time = too bright a screen.

PS if you are taking on paid work of printing for your clients, you owe it to yourself and those clients to up your game by using the most appropriate techniques & technology within your budget.

PPS do check Keith Cooper's YouTube channel

https://youtube.com/@keithcooper?si=K6PXg3otucoGesGy

and also Andrew Rodney

Box Brownie said:

SCoombs said:

For a long while I was not working with a calibrated monitor and I never printed photos. I now do a lot of print work for clients and so I calibrated using a Calibrite DisplayPro HL. Calibrite's own software acts very buggy on my computer and often won't even finish, so I did the actual calibration with DisplayCal. Either way, colors seem reasonable.

Brightness is proving to be a large problem. Both Calibrite and DisplayCal's software put the brightness I was using at about 200 nits. Still, many - but not all - photos I edited before calibration print fine. When calibrating, I lowered brightness to 120 as this is in the range of what is considered correct for printing.

The result is that everything looks very dark. I'll review photos on the camera LCD and they look great, but loading into the computer they look extremely dark and, more importantly, if I try to increase the exposure compensation (in LrC or any other editor) they start to look awful and blown out. I spent several weeks where for every photo I spent an a half hour meticulously fine tuning exposure, highlights, shadows, blacks, and whites, all with a great deal of masking, just to get well lit photos that look good on the camera to look halfway decent. "This can't be right," I kept thinking.

One day I took photos of my kids and I thought they were really well lit on scene, but then I could not get anything that was even remotely decent on the computer. Finally I turned the monitor back up to 200 nits and they look good again, roughly like on the camera. I know this is much, much higher than is considered correct for printing, but at lower brightnesses these photos that look well lit and nice on camera look completely unusably dark on the PC. Here are a few examples, unedited, except for the last one):







Unfortunately most of the really good examples are photos I don't have releases for.

Of these photos, the very warm one in the forest is the best example of one that at 120 nits or even 140 looks far, far too dark, but I can't really brighten it up in any way without things starting to blow out. At 200 nits it looks just about right to me.

When printing many (but not all) photos which look good on the monitor - and, for what it's worth, the camera - are just too dark. They're not usually terribly awfully, unusably dark, but they're darker than they ought to be and darker than you'd expect from something you've paid for.

I'm at a loss as to what to do here. I am considering replacing the monitor as this monitor is by design a gaming monitor - it is an approximately 6 month old LG Ultragear 24" monitor. I know a more photocentric monitor would be better, but how dramatic of a difference can I expect from a monitor that will measure on a calibration device the same brightness as this one?
More generally, please help me understand what is going on here so I can get the brightness sorted out here.

Click to expand...

FWIW and my view of what you say

I found the about your current monitor

https://www.lg.com/uk/monitors/gami...py17TEtUKadz6iqX1qYSK5mYApQHVUSIsxrQ_xWLFW7E0

It is a VA screen and the only gamut mentioned is NTSC (a TV based gamut) of 72% it may be great for gaming but IMO crap for any serious photo editing and even worse for a planned output of printing.

Click to expand...

Interesting to see that. I always bought LG televisions precisely because they were almost always IPS. I only purchased this as a kind of "emergency" stopgap and so didn't look too much into it, but had figured this would be IPS as well.

Box Brownie said:

NB too dark a print in almost 100% of the time = too bright a screen.

Click to expand...

That's what I would have thought. What has me confused is when I get these photos that simply blow out if I try to up the exposure at all but then look too dark, and also photos taken in easy-to-meter situations which look okay on the camera but print dark.

Box Brownie said:

PS if you are taking on paid work of printing for your clients, you owe it to yourself and those clients to up your game by using the most appropriate techniques & technology within your budget.

Click to expand...

I agree, and that is why I am asking this question so I can figure out the best way to handle this.

FWIW

I use a BenQ SW270C and use my xRite Display Pro with BenQ's Pallette Master Ultimate software

This model when used with that software creates a hardware profile i.e. loaded into the monitor and it also has a switching puck that I can use to change from my profile to one of the baked in ones e.g. the default sRGB one.

Mine is set to 80 oops just checked my notes and it is 90cd/m2 as the closest match to the print (Gamma 2.2 and 6500k plus I get a delta E of <1) NB this reminds me that I should do a re-calibration soon.

The screen does indeed look dark compared to the default sRGB (which I think is 160cd/m2 ) but frankly with web usage I very rarely see forum image posts as too dark or too light so never use the default sRGB.

In the main I get prints made commercially but have been printing at home for test & comparison purposes and as I mentioned in my initial reply (bearing in mind that a screen is transmitted light & the print is reflected light) the prints when viewed under a 6500k lamp looks fine in regard to brightness.

Oh, I edit in very subdued lighting.

PS I noticed your call for help in the 'bcg' forum too. I am there too with the same username.

I don't understand.

I have my screen profiled at about 107 nits. (X-Rite i1Display Pro Plus and Displaycal/Argyll CMS.) Photos appear more than bright enough on screen (Philips 27E1N8900 OLED). I admit this is in a small, dimly lit room.

The prints on a Canon Pro 200 sometimes look a little dark, for those of us accustomed to drugstore prints. They show good shadow detail when viewed under strong light, though.

I'm thinking you might well benefit from a totally new approach to exposing the image (camera settings), monitor settings, and editing.

When exposing photos that will be edited (as opposed to used as SOOC JPEGs), usually best approach is to have specular highlights and a very small fraction of the whites just clip. Very few cameras will indicate raw histograms / raw clipping, but if you get just a little indicated clipping (typically blinking on review), that's not a bad starting point (which typically means you have a little more highlight room).

Then you go to edit the raw file. If you plan to print it, IMO the best approach is to edit on a good IPS monitor that's calibrated to about 100 cd/m^2. Over time you might find you get subjectively-better monitor-to-print matching anywhere in the range of about 70 or 80 to 120 or even 140 cd/m^2--but I'd start at 100 and if necessary adjust from there.

When you open the raw file in your favorite raw converter, look at the histogram. Usually you want to adjust the black point so that just a very small fraction of the image clips to black, and to adjust the white point so that just a very small fraction of the image clips to white. Often the auto-exposure, which you often need when shooting any sort of movement / action, won't get it very right. Here's the initial histogram of an action photo I took today:



Yikes! As you can see, there are almost no highlights / very little image content more than about two-thirds the way over. Unless adjusted, a print from a file with this histogram will very likely look dark, and it's unlikely to look good on a monitor. So I used the curves tool to move the white point--the input value that produces output of maximum white--down from 255 to 190, and then to overall brighten what remains, I grabbed around the middle of the curve (here, for aesthetic reasons, a bit below the middle) and dragged it a little up and to the left:



This is the resulting change on the histogram:



The image content is stretched to the right / overall brightened. If necessary you could do the same on the other end and move the black point.

This approach will produce a file that contains a full range of tones from black to white, which typically and for most images, but not always produces the best-looking photo. Also, again, you can overall brighten by grabbing somewhere around the middle of the curve and dragging it up and to the left, or overall darken by grabbing somewhere around the middle of the curve and dragging it down and to the right.

Last but not least, if you want to run tests, at this stage it would probably be better to stop using your own photos, and instead us professionally-prepared test images. See how those look on your screen, and in your prints. That will give you a better idea of where the problem(s) lie. Or if you really want to use your own photos, post a Google Drive or similar link for downloading the raw files, and let people here edit as they think appropriate on calibrated and profile monitors.

FWIW I calibrate to 90 Cd/m2 (nits) and 5000K colour temperature. It's also very important to use a viewing lamp having the same colour temperature as the monitor calibration i.e. 5000K in my case.

I currently print from Lightroom using a Mac mini on an ancient Epson 3880. A couple of years ago, my son bought me a Dell Ultrasharp monitor. It came precalibrated. I have been using Epson profiles, even with Canon paper, nothing special. I have tweaked the brightness and contrast in the LR print module . My prints are very close to what I see on my monitor.