Love malt loaf. Pumpernickel was always a favourite of my father's god rest his soul.

The question is with or without butter ?

Interesting. I know of one professional photographer who has his "developing" room walls painted in the middle grey shade for similar reasons.

Adobe Camera Raw and Slikypix Developer Studio Pro, the two raw converters I use, both have the areas outside the image in grey, one of which is a very dark grey. I have never considered this to be distracting, but possibly would if the image size was the smaller dimensions you experience. You should look into the settings to change that. This is what my screen looks like when opening a raw file, and I can make the image itself even larger by using keyboard commands or stretching the image itself.

My room for developing is one with subdued lighting, but not dark. It is important that your room lights do not shine directly on the screen. If it is daylight I will close the curtains.

Next step to consider is your monitor brightness. This should be lower than the standard settings, in many cases a lot lower. I have mine set to 90 cd/m2, but I think about 110 cd/m2 is what most resources will recommend. If your monitor controls do not allow you to target these levels you could invest in calibration tools, like x-rite or Spyder. These have both software and hardware elements to them. It will also ensure colour accuracy which may or may not be important to you.

I find these settings give me a finished product image that work for both screen viewing, even in daylight, and also for sending off to a printer.

The advice from your photo book company is probably a good rule of thumb, but of course depends entirely on the brightness range the monitor is capable of. One of the most often heard complaints about people who print for the first time is that their prints are too dark. Invariably this is because their screen is too bright !

Try this. Without adjusting your room lighting or screen, process a raw file to your satisfaction and create a jpeg. Then adjust room lighting and screen brightness, and do it again and make another jpeg. Leave a gap of 24 hours between the two so your eyes become used to the new lower screen brightness. Then post both images here.

The other thing to do when processing raw files is to look at the histogram. It can tell you more about the brightness of an image than your brain can, because the latter is always making unconscious adjustments to what you are seeing.

Lovely, and the last one is a stunner.

What dedication...... how long for your feet to defrost ?

Nice captures

Mars was especially bright last night too.

Up to your usual high standard Gareth. I especially like the pano.

Good to see you running a roll through the Z1P. I occasionally use the Z1, very versatile cameras these were, and still are in the right hands.

Colour for me too.

Did you use the K1II in crop mode for these ? Reason I ask is there seems to be vignetting in 1 + 3 top right and left. Strangely, when clicking the picture so it opens in a new tab, the vignetting is gone in the b+w version but not the colour one.

Cracking set, the colours are wonderful.

But no.8 gets the prize for me.

Very nice