Traditional reporting of the image permanence of photographs has tended to primarily focus on light stability. The reality of how consumers use and store prints is that the vast majority of the print's life is spent stored in the dark. The dark stability of traditional silver halide photographic paper is primarily driven by thermal affects. However, many of the newer digital materials used for photographic prints are susceptible to additional dark factor impacts including humidity and atmospheric pollutants. These can result in predicted life times being significantly shorter than reported by light stability data alone. This paper will discuss these additional dark factors and provide comparisons to traditional silver halide photographic paper.

LED (Light Emitting Diode) lighting has been widely used as a major light source to illuminate photographic prints. But it is not clear how aggressive LED lighting affects to image stability of prints. The light stability tests were carried out using some commercially available white LED lamps and fading behavior was compared to the standardized xenon light testing which simulates indirect sunlight indoor. It was clarified that fading under LED lighting is less than xenon lighting but it correlates well to the xenon testing in the order of prints in light stability.