Working conditions

I’d be interested to hear how everybody here goes about ensuring that they have a consistent environment for doing their editing.

Good question. Often left unaddressed.

To be honest, at first, by the title, I thought this topic was about labour practices or hardware sourcing. :roll_eyes: :rofl:

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I figured I’d have a little fun with the title…probably amusing nobody but myself.

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I just moved and my editing machine is on Debian old stable, so I’m starting over soon. I own a color munki photo for my two 24" 1080P dell ultrasharp monitors.

I try not to edit photos in the evening. In the winter, my office is rather dark, the window looks to the west. My screen is calibrated to 120 candela. In the summer I calibrate to 160 candela and let the blinds down. So I probably do it completely wrong.
Was this the question?

Would there be any glare from that?

Let me point that in my case, consistent doesn’t mean ideal in a professional environment.

But now to your question: I work in a room that never gets hit by sun, so I always have to work with the lighting turned on. In that room the light is diffused by means of something on the ceiling like this:

I had fluorescent lights, but years ago I replaced them by led flexible strips. I didn’t look for anything specially designed for photography, but I ended up (mostly by chance) with a 6000ºK lighting that looks nice to my eye.

So whenever I have to work with images, turn on both the lights and the display and do something else for at least 1/2 hour, so they can warm up and stabilize their color. Previously my system has been color profiled for my display and taking into account the CCT color and intensity of my lighting (by means of an i1Display). That’s it. Well, I take extra care that the hardware settings of my display are always the same as when it was profiled.

If I had to work professionally with images, I would change the led strips for these Yuji led ones, specially those that are designed to offer D50 lighting. They’re not cheap, but we’re talking about made a living with photography.

And I would paint my room walls and ceiling in white :smile:

I am fortunate in that I only have time to edit when it’s dark out, and the placement of the only window in the room is such that it’s not a source of light, so I don’t have to deal with the variability of outdoor light coming into the room. So that’s consistency. I still need to work on the evenness and the color temperature of the environment.

To have stable working condition you need to eliminate the weather. Thus mostly you need artificial lightning. The general light source shall be decent and not need to be superb. Everything within your sight shall be color neutral. Monitor’s 50% grey shall match your background.
Use d50 high cri leds to lit up anything you see including background. D50 light will visiually match d65 on your display. It’s strange but it works like that.
Those are general rules I’ve learnt.

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Room: 2nd floor loft, north-facing window to my back. Evenly-lit during the day, but I keep the room in darkness in the evening, which is when i do most of my image work. Between the two lighting environments, I haven’t felt a need to compensate for either.

Monitor: Rather old 24" Flattron W2242T, 8-bit VGA. Characterizes to just about sRGB gamut, and has a hard-coded setting for this colorspace. All the talk on other threads, I’m starting to crave a 10-bit higher-gamut monitor. But, for the rest of you - 8-bit sRGB JPEGs!!

I am not a pro in the sense that I make a living from my photography, but I get published regularly and I care about my work.

For the last eight years everything was done on a Lenovo U410 Ideabook with its 1368 by 784 display - summer sun and winter nights. Now I work on a 15.6" Lenovo Thinkpad with a 1920 by 1080 screen. Day and night - same difference.

Th calendars and prints look just the way I want. All good.