Monitor calibration and soft proofing

The most common cause: a screen that is too bright

Most monitors and laptops leave the factory set to a high brightness so they look good in the shop and in a bright office. A photograph edited on such a screen looks light and airy. Paper, however, only reflects the light in the room, and its brightest white is far less bright. The result: the print is darker.

For editing photographs intended for print, a white brightness of about 80–120 cd/m² is commonly recommended as a guide. The exact value depends on how brightly lit your room is: lower in a darker room, higher in a lighter one. What matters is that, next to a print, the screen should not look like a lamp.

Calibration

Calibration puts the monitor into a known state (brightness, white point, tone curve). Profiling then measures how the monitor actually displays colour and saves an ICC profile, which the operating system and applications use.

To calibrate you need a measuring device (a colorimeter or spectrophotometer) and its software. Common targets for photography:

• white brightness: depending on the room, roughly 80–120 cd/m²,
• white point: D65 (6500 K) is the usual standard for screens; some photographers choose a warmer point so the screen looks more like paper under warm light,
• tone curve: gamma 2.2 or the sRGB curve.

Calibrating “by eye” with test images helps with brightness and contrast, but without a measuring device you cannot set colour reliably. Repeat the calibration, because monitors change over time.

Paper white and the black point

A screen’s white point is as bright as you set it, and its black is close to darkness. Paper has:

• paper white: the lightest possible value is the paper itself. A natural white paper is warmer and darker than a bright white paper with optical brighteners.
• the black point: the darkest black the paper and ink can reach. It is expressed as optical density, Dmax. Density is logarithmic: at Dmax 2.0 the darkest area reflects 1% of the light that the white reflects, a contrast of about 100 : 1. Glossy and baryta papers reach a higher Dmax than matt papers.

Shadow detail you can make out on screen may merge into a single dark area on matt paper.

Soft proofing

Soft proofing (an on-screen print preview) uses the printer-and-paper profile to show how the photograph will look once printed. Photo editing applications offer it as a preview with a choice of profile and rendering intent, often with simulation of paper colour and ink black too.

The method:

1. Turn on soft proofing with the profile for the paper you will print on.
2. Compare the perceptual and relative colorimetric intents (see ICC profiles).
3. Turn on paper and black simulation. The image darkens and loses contrast — that is the truthful picture, not a fault.
4. Adjust a copy of the file for this paper: lift the shadows, add a little brightness and saturation where the paper has “eaten” them.
5. Print a small test section.

The light you judge by

The same print looks different by a window, under a warm bulb and under a cool LED. For professional comparison of prints and screens, viewing conditions are defined by ISO 3664 (the current edition dates from 2025). At home it is enough to:

• judge the print in neutral, sufficiently bright light with a high colour rendering index,
• avoid placing the screen and the paper side by side under completely different light,
• check the print where it will hang as well.

Checklist: the print is darker than the screen

1. Turn down the monitor brightness and calibrate it.
2. Check that the file has an embedded profile and that colours are not converted twice when printing (once by the application, once by the printer driver).
3. Use the profile for the specific paper.
4. Soft proof with paper colour and ink black.
5. Judge the print in sufficient light.

You can try all the causes for yourself in the Colour check tool.