For transmissive hardcopy printing, the relationship between luminance, L, and the printed optical density, D, is:
where:
L0 is the luminance of the light box with no film present
La is the luminance contribution due to ambient illuminance reflected off the film
If film is to be printed with a density ranging from Dmin to Dmax, the final luminance will range between and and the j values will correspondingly range from jmin = j(Lmin) to jmax = j(Lmax).
If this span of j values is represented by an N-bit P-Value, ranging from 0 for jmin to 2N-1 for jmax, the j values will correspond to P-Values as follows:
and the corresponding L values will be L(j(p)).
Finally, converting the L(j(p)) values to densities results in:
Typical values for the parameters used in transmissive hardcopy printing are L0 = 2000 cd/m2, La = 10 cd/m2.