Color Rendition

2011-02-08 • SEND FEEDBACK •
Related: exposure, Lighting

Color accuracy is not just an issue for photographers! Depth perception, apparent brightness and visual acuity all depend on the lighting.

Compared with a daylight-balanced light, a light that is excessively blue impairs vision. Unfortunately, excessively blue light is common with HID and lower-quality LED lights. A light that is too yellow (eg a halogen) is preferable to one that is too blue, but still impairs visual separation of dissimilar objects.

While a far cry from a professional studio-quality light source, the Lupine LED light color accuracy and uniformity across the entire beam is outstanding for a flashlight or headlamp. Too many headlamps or flashlights are yellowish or bluish and produce mottled or discolored beams. The Betty/Wilma/Piko/Tesla emit a uniform, with no dark spots and with consistent color rendition across the illuminated area, thanks to a superb lens system.

“Painted” with the Lupine Wilma

Shooting details

The image shown above was taken under conditions too dark to see in, using the Lupine Wilma to “paint” the scene during a 30-second exposure using the Canon EOS 5D, moving left to right and waving the light over the subject. The 3 brightness levels of the Wilma offer excellent control over exposure when “painting” a scene; I had to take a dozen or so exposures to achieve the desired lighting effect—one huge benefit to using a digital camera, with its immediate results.

It was processed from RAW (CR2) using Daylight color balance and Landscape picture style in Canon’s Digital Photo Professional 3.0, showing just how pleasing the color rendition is, with no custom white balancing required.