Photographerists - screen brightness

I knee there are free tools

Didn’t realise that they were not part of windows

https://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/how-to-calibrate-your-monitor/

not part of windows

Maybe get a Mac OP? https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mac-help/mchlp1109/mac

Generally:
https://www.adobe.com/uk/creativecloud/video/discover/how-to-calibrate-monitor.html

Despite all that

anyone else viewing may have their screen at a different brightness though

Yes. And it will look different as you infer. Also different in different lighting conditions (True Tone and similar notwithstanding).

All you can do is get it right for your well-calibrated system and then hope I think.

I meant now part of windows

I meant now part of windows

Ah! Sorry OP, no excuse for that Mac now.

Use the histogram. Skewed to the right means brighter / more exposed and left, more blacks / shadows. If they look too bright on a phone, maybe pull mid-tones and highlights to the left.

i have the mac on a brightness of 4 or 5 dots but tend to work with the histogram to determine the actual exposure.

I gave up years ago with trying to calibrate. All screens are different, it will drive you mad. The image will always look different across them all.

Put a disclaimer on your selling website.

Sometimes I use colour scanner target in a photograph where possible.

Don't sweat it.... Or you will go mad, I tell you ;-). mad.

Looking at the histogram is the most reliable way, as noted above.

there was a simon de'entremont video where he talked about this, he suggested 90% for a mac laptop. This has served me well, and things print correctly edited to taste - histogram doesnt always work for me as some images are so dark. Sorry i dont remember the title and dont have time to dig but the channel is here: https://www.youtube.com/@simon_dentremont

I do still find that photos edited to look right at 90%, sometimes need a bit more brightness and contrast on a phone screen, so sometimes i just boost those a tiny bit (1-3%) on insta before posting there

Technically "brightness" is what's otherwise referred to as "Black balance" or "pedestal", it's taking all the pixels and adding an amount of luminance to them, hence the term black balance, because too much of it turns the blacks "light", or

"contrast" is what increases the exposure of the image, it's adding a multiplier to the luminance values which means the true blacks stay 0 but the whites move away from it, hence contrast.

OLED's confuse this a bit as a black pixel is black regardless, so brightness and contrast become linked.  When you adjust brightness in the TV settings what it actually does is muck about with the LUT (look-up-table) which is a map to tell it if it's being told x,y,z for RGB then it looks those values up and displays the corrected value. Which in turn is shifting the histogram around to either allow more or less dynamic range in the shadows.

And then TV's confuse this further because LCD+LED TV's (i.e. most of them) try to mimic OLED's, and oddly Sony have now gone back to LCD+LED's for their production monitors which means you're watching an LCD, mimic an OLED mimic a CRT.

Social media platforms, phone screens etc will also apply their own filters regardless, so if you want to have your photos displayed as close as intended you need to account for that. In Lightroom / ACDsee etc you can create presets which might correspond to different media, e.g. a postcard sized print will have far less sharpening than an A0 print, or printing on to canvas typically needs different pedestal (brightness / black balance) as the material soaks in ink and looks like it's turned up anyway.

This leads me to think my computer brightness is way lower than my phone.

if you have a newer, expensive phone & a crappy (old) laptop it's going to have a way better (brighter) screen on the phone yes.

if you have a newer, expensive phone & a crappy (old) laptop it’s going to have a way better (brighter) screen on the phone yes.

New phone, but Dell XPS 17 laptop