Calibrating Your Monitor

The Fall 2014 issue of the CAPA magazine had a neat fact which I haven’t seen anywhere else before. This will be of interest to club members who process their images on their computer and who wonder about calibrating their monitors. The concern is that if you process your images on an overly bright monitor the prints of that image will be too dark.
Here is a summary of what the magazine had to say.
A display brightness of about 100 nits is the recommended industry standard for electronic display brightness (I have no idea what unit a nit is but it doesn’t matter). Check your display brightness with your camera exposure meter. 100 nits is roughly the same as a meter reading of 1/30 sec @ f6.3 @ ISO 200 off a pure white screen.
I checked my display. I used the Google.ca home page for the white screen. I set my ISO to 200, put my camera in shutter mode (S) and set my aperture to 6.3. When I pointed my camera at the white part of the screen I got a shutter speed of 1/50. That means my display is a touch bright (less than an f stop, I have no idea what it is in nits). I can’t turn the brightness on my display down any further than that so I will just have to accept the difference.
So there you have it, a quick, cheap and hopefully a reasonably accurate way to set the brightness of your display for processing all your wonderful summer images.
Happy shooting
Perry