On Jan 17, 2015, at 2:01 PM, Anthony Sanna <asanna@ismaldo.com> wrote:
Could anyone take a guess at what a good viewing EV might be?
It depends entirely on what you're trying to accomplish. If this is a gallery that's designed to be the final resting place of the prints, you should give some serious thought to the brightest environment that's still comfortable. If this is intended as an evaluation place for prints destined for some other presentation, you should approximate the destination light as best you can. If it's just another room in your home where you rotate through your latest prints to see how well you like them, light the room comfortably in general and aesthetically match the lighting on the prints to the rest of the room. No matter what, always keep in mind that all print profiles have built into them assumptions about viewing environment. The D50 standard that almost all profiles use is excellent for all-around work, but it's virtually never ideal for real-world scenes. For best results, you want to use a profile built with a measurement of the actual ambient illuminant where the print is viewed. Doing so is easy with ArygllCMS, and I believe it's a common feature of other profiling systems as well. Of course, such a print only looks right in the light for which the profile was built.... Cheers, b&