Best Colour to Paint a Room?

[Daniel81]

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I am dedicating a room in my house to post-processing and printing.  I will get one of the new Mac Mini's with an Eizo monitor.  Does anyone have solid recommendations on the best colour to paint the walls of the room to optimise viewing and processing images?

[Jeff S]

Many articles suggest shades of grey*, but most discussion prioritizes monitor and room lighting (and/or a print viewing station that simulates display lighting).

* if spouse/partner agrees

Jeff

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[pgk]

Neutral. As the computer 'desktop' should be. But basically just avoid strong colours which will bias your abilities to view images critically. It isn't rocket science although some would have us believe it is😀.

[Stuart Richardson]

GTI Graphic Technology sells a gray paint at B and H that is designed for color viewing booths. I use it at my studio for my magnet board, so it does not contaminate the colors of the print. https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/263737-REG/GTI_N8_G_Standard_Gray_Neutral_8.html/overview

I am not up on the price of paint in the US lately, but I imagine that the paint above would be quite expensive to paint an entire room. As the others said, you are best off using a neutral color and having it matte probably helps a bit as well. For print viewing it is best to have a specific lighter tone like the paint above, but for the room in general, you are not likely to have any problems as long as you are using a neutral white or gray paint. I would say that the lighting is more important than the paint. Something like Solux lighting is best, but it may not be long for this world, depending on how much longer halogen fixtures and bulbs are readily available. I still have not seen anything better. Definitely avoid flourescent, especially if it is in your home. If you are not doing this for a living, just get a very high quality, high CRI led setup, and you will be in good shape. If you can get a solux viewing light, that would be a nice extra.

Edited November 19, 2020 by Stuart Richardson

[pgk]

1 hour ago, Stuart Richardson said:

If you are not doing this for a living, just get a very high quality, high CRI led setup, and you will be in good shape.

I've just been involved in the production of some LED lighting for a photographic set up which requires hundreds of thousands of photographs to be taken (the customer wear their dSLR's shutters out). LEDs can be problematic because many produce excess blue light. One solution is to get ones which are consistent in terms of colour temperature balance and then use mired shift filters to adjust colour temperature to whatever you want to work in for your set-up. Lee filters make sheets of such filter material). Testing has shown this to be surprisingly effective when consistency is required. One word of warning; there are various ways of achieving CIE specified light outputs and one is by mixing 'warm' and 'cold' LEDs which is OK but if and when an LED fails, they colour temperature can shift - I found out the hard way when consistency failed!

[Stuart Richardson]

Interesting to hear. I don't have any scientific knowledge on this front, just experiential. Though they are getting better, people in the lighting industry that I have met are usually saying that the newer technologies are better and have great color reproduction etc, my own experience is that nothing can beat halogen. For me it makes sense, in that we are used to looking at the sun, and both generate light through blackbody radiation, so the spectrum they reproduce is similar. One might be warmer or cooler than the other, but the critical part is that the relationship between the colors are the same. Our eye corrects for the temperature, but not for shifts in color reproduction. LED and fluorescent, on the other hand, can get the temperature right, but not the whole spectrum (without a ton of work), so they always tend to look off. Of course, they are getting better and better at it, but in general it is time consuming, expensive and difficult. They also do not really have an incentive to do it perfectly, as "good enough" is good enough for the vast majority of people and uses. Meanwhile, something like a simple halogen bulb still has more pleasing light than an advanced LED. The trade offs in terms of energy efficiency skew in favor of LED for most uses, but it is frustrating that the simplest and best quality of light is now being phased out. It is especially frustrating here in Iceland, where half the year is very dark and where literally all the electricity generation is green (either hydro or geothermal).

[pgk]

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26 minutes ago, Stuart Richardson said:

LED and fluorescent, on the other hand, can get the temperature right, but not the whole spectrum (without a ton of work), so they always tend to look off.

And as I said, it appears that getting the colour temperature right can be 'fudged'. Which is why we have had to try things out. Most LEDs do emit far more strongly in the blue and I am wondering if using a filter actually helps because instead of using a higher apparent colour temperature, the filter reduces the blue and potentially produces a better spectrum. Its only relevant with specific applications unfortunately. I've been pleasantly surprised at the results though because even the Colour Checker Chart corrects well with LEDs using a Mired shift filter, or seems to so far .....

[250swb]

On 11/18/2020 at 5:00 PM, Daniel81 said:

I am dedicating a room in my house to post-processing and printing.  I will get one of the new Mac Mini's with an Eizo monitor.  Does anyone have solid recommendations on the best colour to paint the walls of the room to optimise viewing and processing images?

Does it matter if you just switch the lights off and look at the monitor?

[Ouroboros]

On 11/18/2020 at 5:00 PM, Daniel81 said:

I am dedicating a room in my house to post-processing and printing.  I will get one of the new Mac Mini's with an Eizo monitor.  Does anyone have solid recommendations on the best colour to paint the walls of the room to optimise viewing and processing images?

During 2000-2 I was invited to join a Special Interest Group at the Chartered Quality Institute tasked with devising an international Best Practice standard for the preparation of digital files within colour managed workflows to ensure predictable and repeatable outcomes for anyone with a vested interest in colour management across numerous industries (photography labs, printing, dyeing, paint manufacture, monitor manufacture etc).   

The discussions we had about working environment recommendations went on a bit but were mainly common sense; ideally baffled and constant D65 lighting, 18% grey walls, floor and ceiling, no window light, hooded monitors  left to 'warm up' for several minutes before use and operators to wear neutral coloured clothing when editing. 

A viewing cabinet would be ideal especially if you're aiming for some level of commercial output, at the very least you'll also need to adopt a regime of frequent calibration and profiling. None of this is rocket science, processing files and printing is about controlling variables.   

It's the final print that makes your investment in your camera and lenses worthwhile.  

 

 

    

[Exodies]

I think the operators clothes would have a larger effect on the local light colours than the walls - inverse square rule and positioning.

[jaapv]

Whatever else - I have my i1Color permanently attached; It monitors the ambient light and adjusts calibration accordingly every 10 minutes.

[jaapv]

22 minutes ago, Exodies said:

I think the operators clothes would have a larger effect on the local light colours than the walls - inverse square rule and positioning.

One should wear black velvet coveralls.

[verwackelt]

In practice there are almost none of these ideal spaces.
i work as a freelance retoucher in postproduction companies and in advertising agencys.
Almost all of them has colorful decorated fancy rooms with very saturated artsyfartsy graphics.
Big windows in which the sun shines half the day are common too.
So the operator shade the windows with shabby cardbords. It gives a nice contrast to the stylish interieur too
They got Eizos but at some agencies you have to look if the calibration was not back in the last milennium.
What i do in such places is making a proof from a standard file and compare it to the screen i have to work at.
With that differences in mind i get used to the casts and differences of that screen.
It is quiet common to make some proofs till the customer is happy.
I only know 2-3 companies from about 20-25 where are such ideal places and they have an operator who is hired just for colourmanagement and calibration of the workflow.
But these companies are getting scarce today.