Printing for ambient light conditions

[Richard Fenner]

I just received a batch of digital proofs (chromira, glossy paper) and sat down to review them. I generally wait until I get good light in the room for doing this, to see each print at its best. Today was unnaturally bright for the last few months - we're not talking a bright Australian sun here, but a very bright day for the south of England! And I got a shock - the prints were much lighter than I expected them to be, often unacceptably so. Although I'd chosen bright days before, this changed the prints completely.
This isn't the first time I'd contemplated the lighting conditions for prints - in my house, I realise the downlights won't be very kind to the prints, often leaving the walls a little gloomy. Yet other people might have bright houses, and a gallery (we all have our dreams!) would be very bright, with just the 'right' light.

We're not talking about overall brightness here - there are parts of images that need toning down, as well as some overall images.

How do other people make this decision? My feeling is, for now, the prints will be in my house, and those of a few other people often with similar lighting conditions, so I should print for that. But if the prints are seen by a curator, they'll be viewed in brighter 'gallery' conditions, and not look the way I want them to. This isn't exclusively a digital question - the same issues have come up in the past with my Cibas - I just avoided the issue then!
Suggestions?

[paulr]

this is never easy. the important thing is that you're thinking about it. always a nightmare to print a whole pile of work and then discover they all look like black holes when you hang them on the wall.

my solution is to have a few different viewing setups, and to try to get everything to look at least decent under all of them. the first is my main viewing light, which is a 150 watt tungsten flood light, set at a distance to give about the average brightness i've measured in museums and galleries (not counting vintage print rooms at museums, which are lit like tombs). my second viewing area is a walk-in closet with a 60 watt incandescent bulb. this is typical dark home lighting. the third is by a north facing window under open sky in the middle of the day. this is bright, flat, cold light--if your prints have any tendency to look washed out, this will exaggerate it. i don't worry about direct sun, because you don't want that under any circumstances.

also: i'm currently printing with digital quadtone inks, so i don't have any control over the color. when i was making toned gelatin silver prints, i had to worry about the color looking right under different lights, so i had a 4th viewing setup--3200 K halogen. about half the galleries i've seen use this kind of light, and the color is distinctly different from regular flood lights.

[Matthew Cordery]

I have one of these these hanging in my darkroom. It helps.

[Richard Fenner]

Matthew, I've considered something like that before, and when I've needed bright conditions I've sometimes turned on the lightbox (which could probably double as a sunbed!). But that still leaves me with the problem of which printing style to adopt!

It seems I have two choices - print one version, and accept that sometimes, it won't show off the print the way I want it. Print two versions - and then have the best print for the job ready, at greater cost and impracticality.

Colours don't seem too badly affected by the lighting conditions that I've compared. The probem comes from the lightness and detail visible (technical term?). For example, one shot, sunset of a city, colour in sky andreflected in water, bottom 1/4-1/3 of image showing the buildings. In the normal lighting conditions I've been considering, as if on my walls and seen on an ordinary day into twilight, there was a nice richness to the colour (not OTT), and while you could make out the buildings fairly easily, they were subdued. Seeing it on a bright day, it looked like a late sunrise shot, with a fairly weak sky against a well-lit dull old city foreground. Not what I saw at the time, and not how I thought I'd been printing it!

I am surprised more people haven't come across this problem - the average home lighting conditions are nowhere near those of the average museum/gallery, and there are many members here who cross these boundaries.

My feeling is that I'm going to print for stronger lighting, and for mildly controversial reasons. I don't want to be dealing with different runs of each print, and in my experience, most people who judge prints on the wall in houses are not so critical that they need be 'perfect'. But they usually want to see more than those on the wall, so out come the unframed prints and better light!

Thanks.

[Paul Coppin]

There are several things at work here. Some of it has to do with your expectations for the print (and I'm not trying to be insulting, just pragmatic . Not all (probably few, in fact) prints play well for both up close and personal viewing, and being appreciated from a distance. A good print that can cover both scenarios has interesting detail within its graphical elements, and good graphical elements, because you don't see the detail when you stand back, only the graphic design. If that doesn't work, i.e. if its the details that carry the interest in the print, there's no point in printing it for distance viewing. The printers that cross the boundaries have chosen prints that have full merit in both of these areas. If the devil is in the details, size matters...

What I'm getting at, is the nature of the print will determine its optimum viewing environment, and that environment will dictate the character of printing needed to enhance the important elements of the print. Office and some gallery environments are at one extreme, requiring generally large scale and tolerant of more heavily exposed/printed images. Intimate home surroundings are usually several orders of magnitude dimmer, and the print for there will of necessity be lighter to be visible, or the print will have to be task lit, not a bad idea for drawing interest to it.. Walk around with your ambient light meter in different environments and see how many f-stops difference there is in the environments you frequent. You may be surprised how dim the average home environment is. From this technique, you'll also get an idea how bright a viewing area you'll need to properly evaluate the print density when making the prints, if the intention is to locate them in large open well-lit areas. A print properly printed will be dark to your eyes, coming out of the darkroom, or off the printer, if you have typical home lighting.

Colour matters too, although the eye is good at compensating - the predominant tones in a print are accentuated or muddied by the colour temperature of the surroundings. If it happens that the areas of your print that carry the detail and/or the interest are of colour that goes flat under fluorescent lighting, then you never will make that print sparkle in that environment, unless you can spot it with a warmer light (which is a way to bring life to prints in horrid cold tube fluorescent rooms).

I share your pain. I routinely print too light and wind up going back and doing it again once I get to see it in all its naked glory...!