Hi Cyndy.
Sorry to hear about your daughter. I wish her the best of success.
I haven't had a problem with bright monitors, so it is an issue I have not had to wrestle with personally. I would assume the software has a manual with suggested steps. A friend of mine (who has done this sort of thing with Shades) suggested calibrating first, then using Shades (or DarkAdapted Pro) to lower the luminance. Some monitors go rather "flat" if you lower the luminance all the way, so it may require some trial and error.
Here's what I would probably try.
1. Lower your monitor luminance before profiling, watching to see if you see any big changes as you do so. As you are lowering luminance, you could display a 21 step grayscale in Photoshop to assess what is happening. My website has a 21 step grayscale on the Color Management page, under the heading "Viewing Gallery Images". (http://www.dinagraphics.com/color_management.php)
2. In my calibration software, I set the target settings to 5200K, 2.2 gamma, 90 cd/m2 luminance. These settings work great for me and give me an excellent monitor to print match in terms of color, luminosity and tonal distribution. Lowering the temp setting warms up the color, increasing it cools it off. I use 5000K lighting for viewing my prints.
3. If your monitor brightness is still high, then try using DarkAdpated Pro to lower the luminance to your desired target point after calibration and profiling.
4. Personally, I would download MeasureTool from the X-Rite website (part of the ProfileMaker Pro profiling package. ProfileMaker is expensive, but many of the features of MT work without a license or paying for the software.) Load it and use MT in "transmissive mode" so you can read a backlit object, like a transparancy....or a monitor.
5. Display your 21 step grayscale in Photoshop after you have done the above steps. First, if your calibration is good, you should be able to see all 21 steps in the grayscale image. If not, something is amiss. You may have to look very closely to see separation between the two darkest steps, but you should be able to see it. Using Measuretool, read the 21 steps one by one. It will give you data for each point in "Lab" units. The L* number gives you the luminance, and the a*/b* numbers give you color component. When both a* and b* are zero, you have a dead neutral gray, and the further they stray from zero, the more color cast you have. The purpose of using MT is to provide some objective numbers to your grayscale measurements and to see if using DarkAdapted Pro is skewing your color, or just lowering luminance properly. You could even measure your 21 step grayscale before and after using Dark Adapted Pro to see what happens. You probably won't be right at zero, but you should be within about 4 or 5 units.
I hope this isn't too complicated. If the MT thing is too much, then simply display the 21 step grayscale image in Photoshop and look closely at it. If the steps look neutral and are well distributed, you are off to a good start. Then, try a normal print and see if it matches. Compare your print to a "Soft Proof" in Photoshop, using the profile of the paper and the rendering intent you used to make your print. For now, I'd print on "photo" papers, since they have wider color gamut and dynamic range, and will show less color and contrast loss than matte fine art papers. We just want to see if we are close at this point.
I have a long article on "Monitor & Printer Profiling" on my website, which you are welcome to read and download. It explains a lot of this stuff in fairly easy to understand terms.
Best of luck, on both counts.
Lou
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