Print Evaluation Light Box--Rethinking Color Temperature

Like a lot of people, I have always evaluated my prints under a carefully selected "daylight" light source.

I'm rethinking that.

None of my customers is going to display their portraits under a daylight source at 5000K. And most daylight sources are deleterious to prints anyway.

So why should I evaluate the print under daylight?

I'm thinking now about setting my reference light source color temperature at 3000K or 4000K, or building something I can switch between 3000K, 4000K, and 5000K, depending on how I know a particular product is going to be displayed.

Thoughts? Has anyone already done this?

If you view a 'daylight white' patch under 3000K light, it will have an orangish (warm) appearance that your brain accepts as 'white'. If you have a critical eye, you will know 'warm lighting'.

The danger of print evaluation under a warm light is that you might not be able to judge with accuracy what is truly neutral, and you might correct to overly warm/cool final print. OTOH, if as you say "your clients don't evaluate under neutral conditions either, does it really matter?!" Hard to argue against that.

Put another way, if we cannot control if our clients use overly cool monitors or overly warm monitors or even ones that have an off tint to evaluate our images, "Does it really matter" that we correct our images to neutral? I still say, 'Yes' because we do not want a critical eye with a neutral set of evaluation conditions to find fault with our inappropriately adjusted image!

Does it truly matter? I'd say "Probably it does not truly matter...as color printers judging color balance in our darkrooms and less than perfect print viewing conditions (open window light can be remarkably cool or warm, depending upon weather and time of day) we got along for decades for most circumstances. But as 'keeper of the faith' we owe it to others to get it as close as we can, and be the bearer of the standard.

And deleterious conditions are not 'daylight'...it is ALL bright light!

You are chasing a ghost trying to find a one size fits all solution. Unless you know the conditions where a print will hang, and can edit for those exact conditions, there is no solution.

My prints hang on several relative's home walls. Some have simple tungsten lamps. Some have LED track lights, maybe a little florescent. My biggest problem is that many hang in fairly dark areas. If I had known I would have cranked the brightness way up.

Yes. Daylight.

Plus of course there may be a large part of the day when the artificial lights are off. My bedroom, living room and dinning room have adequate window light during the day. The lights only go on in the afternoon/evening.

If you are evaluating the print strictly on its own merits, you can do whatever you like. However if you are comparing it to your monitor they should always be the same temp.