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 p.1 #2 · Need Wall Utilization Help | |
When sitting at a screen editing a photo your eyes adapt to the content of the screen just as they do in person to the bluish light in shade, the greenish light under trees, etc. where by eye, once your brain adapts perception, everything looks "normal" i.e. neutral. It's not a function of monitor calibration but rather your brain shifting your perception of what is on the screen.
Green subjects are the worst in that regard because most of the retina is covered with rod cells which are sensitive to a narrow range of greenish light and are about 3000x more sensitive to light than the color sensing cones in the center 2 degrees of the eye's FOV. That physiology of the eye is why we can see better at night with peripheral vision (catch movement out of the corners of your eye first) and why red lights are used at night on instruments and interior lighting. The rods don't react to the red preserving "night vision" in all the other colors.
There is a classic optical illusion that illustrates eye fatigue when looking at bright green. It's a pattern of green blocks separated by gray bars. Stare at it for a few minutes and you'll swear the bars are magenta. not gray.
The implication when editing is that if you sit and stare at just your screen while editing a landscape that's a sea of bright green your color perception may shift toward magenta as it does in person in the forest. Things that are neutral in the photo will start to look magenta and reacting visually you might perform a + magenta correction to the file, making one that was actually neutral + magenta. Since your eyes are adapted to the monitor you won't see the + magenta until monitor is compared to a print of the adjusted file. Then since you trust your "calibrated" monitor implicitly you'll think there's a problem with the printer profile.
If you have a neutral wall color and D65 room lighting similar to the white point of the monitor what it will allow you do to is take periodic breaks from looking at the screen image to look at the blank wall for a minute or so. That will be all the time it will take for your brain to recalibrate it's AWB back to neutral. Then when you look at the monitor again you'll be seeng it from a neutral baseline.
It's similar in concept to putting a gray card in an image then clicking on it and seeing the color change on screen. Color might have look OK before the correction to make the card neutral, but after the correction by before/after comparison your brain trusting the second correct view more allow you to see the color cast the file had SOOC.
It's not really necessary to paint all the walls Munsel gray. If you have D65 lighting in the room and look around periodically your brain will recalibrate to the familiar neutral objects in the room.
The graphic arts standard for viewing has long been 5000K lighting. When I ran a printing operation we would only compare transparencies and proofs in specially designed booths and light boxes and projectors with 5000K sources. That matched the color and relative brightness when comparing a slide to a printed sample. We installed 5000K high CRI fluorescent bulbs in every fixture in the faciltiy so wherever you looked at print the color perception would be the same as in the proof booth.
D65 is the better standard for computer based workflow because when you select an editing space like sRGB, AdobeRGB, or ProPhotoRGB the white point of the monitor shifts to that "shade" of white, if it's not already set that way by the monitor calibration. One of the problems with viewing on uncalibrated monitors is the "native" white point is usually way to high and bluish.
If it's not practical to change your room lighting or paint the wall gray get some Munsel gray paint and make a big gray card and hang it over your computer instead of one of your beautiful landscapes. Your eyes and brain will thank you. Just tell your friends it's one of your paintings from your minimalist period 
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