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
Use a light path node to control the visibility of your material.
Add a Mix Shader to your material so you can independently control the visibility and influence of your material.
On the top socket connect the material that describes how the emission should be, on the bottom socket connect a shader that will control its direct visible appearance. In the factor socket connect a Light Path node's Is Camera output.
You could try using a Light Path: Is Camera Ray fac in a Mix Shader node to differentiate between a straight emission (light) and an emission with the image (what shows up). This is the node setup:
Using this, I was able to create this:
The Light Path fac is quite interesting. You can read a more in depth description in my answer here.
