Hardware Calibration Targets

Fine Art Printing and Print Proofing

• Luminance (Brightness): 90cd.
• Whitepoint (Temperature): 5800k.
• Black Point: 0.4cd (~220:1 contrast ratio).
• Gamma: 2.2.
• Gamut: Full/Native.

A brief explanation of reasoning behind these particular settings below:

• Luminance: You can (and should) use a brightness of 80cd if you are in a perfectly compliant ISO3664 lighting environment (32lux brightness, neutral middle grey colour, low reflectance), but unfortunately the vast majority of people are in a brighter environment than this, so we recommend a tad higher at 90cd for most people's average studio/editing den environment.
• Whitepoint: A whitepoint closer to 5800k gives the best result for most people. This is because of the mixed daylight/artificial lighting situation that most real-world spaces exhibit - 5800k can often better perceptually align with the average 'non-ideal' viewing environment. Optical brightening agent (OBA) content in many papers can also cause a cool shift when fluoresced by UV in said environment, so shifting the whitepoint slightly cooler can help accommodate/compensate for this. And finally most monitor’s backlights are calibrated and designed for maximum accuracy and performance at 6500k (D65), the further away from D65 you get, the less spectrally accurate they get. You most certainly can refine/tweak this through testing for a closer match to a particular paper or final viewing conditions. e.g see ColorNavigator's Advanced Functions > Manual Adjustment. See also here.
• Black Point: The correct black point is technically determined by the contrast ratio of the paper you are printing on (that is, the maximum difference between brightest paper white and darkest inky black). Matte papers have a lower contrast ratio than gloss papers for example - some matte papers can be as low as 50-75:1 contrast ratio, most semi-gloss is 150-250:1, and high gloss/baryta can be as high as 300:1.  But note that we're trying to match tone relationships here, not absolute contrast, so we recommend ~200:1 as the best average/all-around figure for most papers (even if they are a 'lower contrast' matte paper). Again, don't misunderstanding the difference between a papers contrast ratio and the required monitor contrast ratio to match/represent this - the danger of elevating the monitor black point too far (by setting too low of a contrast ratio in trying to match the absolute paper contrast ratio) is that: shadows look lighter than they really are; blacks look less deep than the print can actually achieve, and you compensate for this by adding contrast and crushing shadows (false shadow separation). This results in prints that come out too dark, where shadow detail is lost, and midtones are shifted downward. This can be varied within reason to better match a particular paper if all you are trying to do is target/match/print on that one particular paper, but this will require some measurement and experimentation, the nuances of which are beyond the scope of this article. To calculate the required black point in cd, take your screen luminance, and divide it by the target contrast ratio, this will give you the black point. eg 90/200=0.45.
• Gamma: Gamma should almost always be 2.2, unless you’re doing something very unusual or exotic. Very simply gamma correction is an operation used to correct for the non-linear way that human visual perception works in regards to luminance.
• Gamut: Provided you are using a wide-gamut imaging monitor, then you can quite safely just use your monitor's full native gamut. This is the simplest approach and lets the monitor show its full hardware capability, which matters because many printable colours fall outside sRGB and you want to be able to see them during editing rather than have them clipped at the calibration stage.

See our article on The Fundamental Differences of Screen to Print Comparisons for more information around all this.