In my last post, I was bemoaning the choice between setting your monitor to a high brightness level so that it’s comfortable for most things and setting it to a lower level to get more accurate soft proofing. It turns out that with the NEC PA series monitors you can have your cake and eat it too. There’s an application called MultiProfiler, a free download from www.necdisplay.com/ MultiProfiler, that allows, among other things, control of the screen brightness without losing calibration.
Using this app, it’s easy to set things up so that you do most of your work at 140 candelas per square meter, or even higher if you want to, while retaining the ability to quickly change the monitor brightness to 80 candelas per square meter for soft proofing. The method of changing the brightness seems to be to change the duty cycle of the pulses fed to the LED backlight, so color accuracy should not be affected. If you’re worried about this, do your color calibration at the brightness level that you’re going to be using to judge color.
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