is it good or bad? is their proof? can it make you see colours better and sharpness and focus? or does it just make your eyes tired and sleepy?

You are talking about editing in the dark i guess.. Means working on your pc/mac/monitor without light!

Well.. Its much better to work in the dark Vera.. But, that won't really help if your monitor ain't calibrated or its not that good to deal with colours..You know what i mean? There are 17" TFT LCD monitors for US.$ 140.00 and there some other 17" TFT LCDs for US.$ 400.00! You know what i mean i guess..

Now about hurting your eyes or make them tired and sleepy, that will also go back to your monitor and the rediation!

All the surrounded lights can affect/change what you really see in the monitor. For example. Adrean baugh a new Samsung few days back... The Samsung monitors, specially the 2XXBW series were designed to give rel good and pro colours and sharpness.. I helped Adrean to clibrate his monitor and i gave him allready two of my profiles that i use for some commercial work. He was 100% happy with them and he told me right a way that he saw the difference, sigh!

Now that series of monitors (SYNCMASTER) comes with two very important softwares that been released only for some models of Samsung! And what they do is, calibrate the actual hardware! Monitor/Printer

These types of monitors with these two software, can allow you to choose your atmosphere! Means if you are working in a dark or light room, if light, what type of light, and so on to make sure that you can provide the right results.!!

Hope that helped tho, as i said, my self i work 100% in the dark :)

JOE

Much would depend on your workflow I would imagine. 

If you are changing screens frequently then a darkened room is definitely to be avoided as changes in brightness will cause your iris to open and close quickly to compensate and lead to eye strain.  If you are concentrating on one particular low contrast scene then perhaps it is not so important.  
It would also depend upon the image size and screen resolution. If you are editing images for the web and have a large high res. screen then the image will not fill the screen so has plenty of area around it with your preference for background in the image editor chosen.

As a general guide I would prefer a light behind the screen to give an ambient light to the background you see with peripheral vision and avoid harsh contrast.  A small halogen desk lamp playing on a neutral coloured wall behind the screen is my preference.

As Joe has touched upon above the ideal is to have your monitor calibrated in the light which the final image/print will be seen.  Some calibration devices will adjust the screen continously to compensate for ambient light intensity and colour. They assume a  colour temperature which you set as part of the calibration process as being the final viewing light.

Whatever your chosen preference for viewing, bright light is to avoided on the monitor screen as it will cause a loss of saturation and detail in what can be seen.

hth

yeah - my mum asked me the other day where my watermarks were on my images as Joe had poitned it out on one of them - i know (because i have used her screen) that it is 1. too dark and 2 got a lot of light glaring onto it - so overall the images seem too dark and less contrasty. If you cant see my watermarks in the photos i have uploaded recently (judging by the fact that i think my screen is as well calibrated as it can be and i can see them), then you are either looking at the screen in the light or it isnt calibrated right ;) Although it might just be because i am trying not to ruin the shot yet still have a watermark in there (curve my recent black and white one and you will see two watermarks pop up in the black areas )

I tend to do my processing at night if i can, because i see a marked difference in contrast and colour work when i do it in the middle of the day when my room is lit up like a softbox! ;)
And Richard's suggestion of ambient light which doesnt hit the screen is a good one, working in complete darkness can be risky if you have things lying around, plus if you arent a touch typer then you wont be able to see the keys :biggrin:

Hee Hee good point about the touch typing - I've been teaching myself - Just gotta learn where the backspace key is most of the time - you know when you keep hitting the equals key?