How do you make an image emission without washing out the image? I am trying to make a computer monitor. This means I have to have an image texture for the screen. My image texture is currently connected to an Emission BSDF shader. Unfortunately, when the emission is bright enough to emit light, the image is white-washed. I tried adding a Brightness/contrast node to the image before pushing it into the Emission BSDF, but it seems to directly counter the Emission's strength.

The desired light level


The desired image brightness
You might want to learn how the view transform impacts the dynamic range of capture.

Using color management and custom LUTs you can work using a much higher dynamic range. Using simple shaders you can do things like this, where no other lights are used on the scene, just the image on the TV screen.:



See:

Make the flame of a candle more yellow

Render with a wider dynamic range in cycles to produce photorealistic looking images