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There's something I don't understand. A number of respected photographers make a point of recommending and using a viewing light with which to judge prints. Ott light specifically is designed for this purpose. The colour temperature is about 5500 degrees and the lighting is significantly brighter than normal viewing, even in a gallery.
Here's a view of Michael Reichmann's new gallery in Toronto. I'm a great fan of Michael's work by the way.
I remember making a presentation to a camera club. My images were simply held up or leaned against the wall, but when it came time to do the weekly contest, out came two powerful floodlights and a good 15 minutes was spent with these two lights a few feet way from where the prints were to be seen, adjusting the lights just right, even checking with a spot meter to be sure that lighting was 'optimal'.
OK guys and gals, am I the only one who thinks this is patently absurd? Any print which was made to look right under the two floods three feet away would look very poor in just about any other lighting situation. A print that looks good under the bluish light of viewing lights at 5500 degrees is going to look odd under 2800 degree incanescents.
Print viewing in the digital age is simple - let the print dry (time varies with papers and inks - but in my experience prints lighten over the first 20 minutes or so), then view the image under light of a colour and intensity which is consistent with the likely future viewing conditions.
For me I don't have a lot of light over my computer screen so I step away from the printer and go to a table lit with ordinary fluorescents -
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Yes, this example of print viewing you mentioned is absurd. If anything, the complete opposite would be the preferred method. A very good friend of mine and a very accomplished fine art photographer states that a dim light should be used as this will illustrate the print's luminosity.
Look at your print in low light and if the image still "pops" you know that under a more normal lighting circumstance, the image will shine.
Are your fluorescent light color-corrected? Otherwise, I don't think I'd use them...
Good point, I'm just finished printing 25 images for a portfolio and had chosen to warm tone the black and white images. I therefor wandered round the house checking the prints in various lighting situations to check the colour of the 'toning'.
As the main place I look at my images is my office, which is of course fluorescent lit, this seems to work fine. When I was selling at the farmers market, lighting was mercury vapour - now that was challenging - though oddly more for black and white images and for papers than for colour prints which looked fine - my lovely warm Crane Museo for which I had paid a fortune looked downright yellow, not cream like at home.
I'm still color management novice, making my way through a book on color management, but I'm going to use an analogous situation to suggest a reason:
Before I became seriously interested in photography, I used to do a lot of audio work: mixing, mastering, etc. Audio engineers usually have some reference speakers that have a relatively "flat" at known response. The idea is that making a song sound good on those speakers means that the song will typically sound good on most configurations. Of course, most good engineers will have multiple sets of speakers for testing in their setup, and are likely to test out mixes on all sorts of gear to see how it holds up in different situations. I guess the key idea here is that your reference speakers produce something that is likely, but not guaranteed, to sound good on most speakers.
In photography it seems like you have to have some sort of reference lighting. If the effect of lighting is as great as you claim, basically that a print can, and probably will, look good under one temperature lights and odd under others, then I suppose my analogy is way off. But is this true? Is a print that was designed with 5500 degree lights in mind really going to look lousy under 2800 degree lights? I haven't really done a lot of A/B testing to check that. I've compared the sun, which is about 5500K around noon, to incandescent lights and I think something that looks great in the sun typically looks pretty good under incandescents as well. I work at a place that has some reference light stations set up and I will try comparing various prints in those to some fluorescents and incandescent light.
Something interesting to note is this picture of the aforementioned Reichmann gallery. You can see that the print viewing station has a significant blue tint when compared with the gallery lights over the wall.
For the moment, I'll keep doing what I've been doing: checking out my prints under a variety if lighting situations and trying to figure out what works for me.
My own observations are that overall colour temperature makes little difference in that whatever colour temperature the room is at, the eye quickly adapts to it and thus 'colour corrects' the print just like the sofa and whatever other coloured objects there are in the room. If on the other hand you have a room lit with one temperature light then you stick the print under a light of different temperature, then you are going to get the wrong idea about colour - just like you observed in the shot of Michael's studio. The reason that light source makes a big difference in black and white has to do with optical brigheners in the paper and with metamerism of the inks used. There is little colour ink in a black and white print made with a dedicated black and white driver for a colour printer but there's tons without that dedicated driver as much more colour ink is used to get gray. That's why I used quadtone rip till I got a printer which has it's own dedicated black and white driver (Canon iPF5000). In the past and without a dedicated monochrome driver, prints looked green in north light and pink under fluorescents and they could not be shown or sold. Non pigment inks don't have anything like this problem but as they aren't archival, they still can't be sold - so were never an option for me.
Ah, the lighting of prints....it is a conundrum. I haven't figured it out yet so I still wander from light source to light source to look at prints. What seems to work best for me is a mix of daylight and artificial light....but then when I'm printing at night....
sigh....a conundrum.
Yes, I have always thought that the 5500K viewing light is crazy for final viewing of the print which is almost always seen in much warmer lights in homes. Someone once told me that the ~5000K light is used to match the print to the screen since most assumptions have been that this is the best way when using sceen light and print comparison. BUT, I agree that the argument falls apart when thinking about just the viewing conditions for the print out of your studio.
So what do I do? I match the screen with a ~5000K light, but then look at the print on a print rail that uses halogen lights which are rated at about ~3500K and make sure that it will look good in this warmer light which is much more typical of the light that will be used in a home or gallery. Virtually nobody has ~5000K solux bulbs in this environment. Nobody is finicky enough or willing to spend the money.
Bottom line is that I am not convinced that my ~5000K print to screen match light is necessary at all.......
I think the sound analogy is correct. Using a relatively even light with out a color cast allows you to judge both the print, and the printers condition. In particular unbalanced flourescents can be problematic because they don't simply create a color cast but have very specific colors they emit light at. Trying to decide actual viewing conditions seems dubious. A full spectrum bulb will give a good approximation of a lot of lighting conditions.
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