A lot of useful things have already been said here, but I think there’s still something missing. Colour management has two components: calibrating devices AND profiling them so the operating system (and thus any software that uses colour management) knows what it’s dealing with.
To calibrate means to adjust e.g. a monitor to match certain target values, specifically a given colour space, gamma curve and brightness. After doing this you can say “Now my monitor complies to sRGB with a brightness of 120”. However, your software doesn’t know that unless you create an ICM profile for your calibrated device, install it in your operating system and link it to that device. For profiling you can use the same tools you already have for calibration.
Another thing I’d like to add is that 120 brightness is “correct”, but it’s significantly darker than what people are used to look at. For me personally it’s too dark so I’m going for a brightness of 160. That also works well if you keep in mind that physical prints will be darker than that.
A lot of useful things have already been said here, but I think there’s still something missing. Colour management has two components: calibrating devices AND profiling them so the operating system (and thus any software that uses colour management) knows what it’s dealing with.
To calibrate means to adjust e.g. a monitor to match certain target values, specifically a given colour space, gamma curve and brightness. After doing this you can say “Now my monitor complies to sRGB with a brightness of 120”. However, your software doesn’t know that unless you create an ICM profile for your calibrated device, install it in your operating system and link it to that device. For profiling you can use the same tools you already have for calibration.
Another thing I’d like to add is that 120 brightness is “correct”, but it’s significantly darker than what people are used to look at. For me personally it’s too dark so I’m going for a brightness of 160. That also works well if you keep in mind that physical prints will be darker than that.