Walk with light

[kickaha]

Everyone who has passed by my office (okay, not *everyone*, but a huge number of people) have commented either to me, or to amongst themselves as they walk away, "What is up with the color of the lights in this office??"

These lighttubes are *bright*. They're also really, really blue. The hallway? Yellow. Other offices? Yellow. Mine? Bright blue-white.

I *love* it, since it's a lot like daylight, but I was also surprised at the difference, so I did some searching online for the info printed on the side of the tubes.

They're new Philips low-energy (~40% less) tubes with a 5000K color spectrum. Y'know, plant lights. Lovin' it.

Comments

[ginkgo.livejournal.com]

Dude! I'm glad you like it now.

I looked at lamps for your office today since you didn't like them initially.

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

Cool, thanks. :) I may get a reading light or something, just to provide a *focussed* light, but as for overall light levels, I can't complain. (Well, one end of the office is brighter than the other, but hey... ;) )

[georgmi.livejournal.com]

Are they continuous-spectrum, or just regular fluorescent tipped toward blue by the color of the coating on the glass?

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

I think they're blue-shifted (they keep getting closer!), but I could be mistaken. Without a colorimeter, I'm not sure. :)

Things look generally bluer, when compared to the hallway lights, but after I'm in here for a while, of course, everything looks 'normal'.

Here's the product sheet: http://www.nam.lighting.philips.com/us/ecatalog/fluor/pdf/p-5415.pdf

Mine are the F32T8/TL750 units, last on the table. CRI of 78 isn't too bad.

[georgmi.livejournal.com]

A CRI of 78 means a fairly discontinuous spectrum--certain wavelengths are disproportionately present or absent compared to daylight or incandescent. 78 is definitely better than most fluorescents, but not good enough to make me want to light my house with them.

It's not the color of a fluorescent light that bothers most people, it's the spectrum discontinuity. With any continuous-spectrum light source, our brains adjust to the color of the ambient light. This is why we perceive a piece of paper as the same color outside on a sunny day, outside on a cloudy day, and inside under incandescent lighting. (An unbiased recorder shows these colors as, respectively, relatively white, relatively blue, and relatively red--a digital camera shooting in RAW mode gives an excellent example of this.) With a discontinuous spectrum, our brains adjust the best they can, but colors that are over- or under-represented in the light source still look weird to us, and depending on the individual, this can be slightly to very disconcerting. M. gets headaches after only a short exposure, while I seem largely unaffected.

If the bulbs become more widespread through your building, you'll eventually stop noticing their color, because our brains only really notice the color of a light source as it differs from nearby sources. (Except in the degenerate case of single-wavelength sources, like Christmas lights.)

Actually, there's a fair amount of evidence that our eyes don't perceive color at all--our brains apparently add it into our mental images in post-processing.

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

Yeah the CRI of 78 was only in comparison to other bulbs I was finding with ratings down in the mid 50s to high 60s. Looks like around 90 is the threshold for most people to consider the light 'naturalish', but this isn't too bad.

[georgmi.livejournal.com]

As a photographer, I have particularly stringent standards when it comes to CRI--I can adjust white balance very easily with continuous-spectrum sources, either with filter/film choices in traditional photography, or with a color temperature adjustment in post-processing of digital images. But if a particular wavelength isn't present in the light source, there's no filter I can use or PP action I can take that will add that wavelength back in.

Add that to my natural pedantry, and you have Yet Another Way that the universe can annoy me. :)

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

*scribble*adds to list*scribble*

Oh, uh, I mean... that's a shame.

;)

Point taken about postprocessing. BTW, I take it you've seen the funky hypercolor tricks that have been going around - some are quite stunning.

[georgmi.livejournal.com]

I discovered a long time ago that the universe exists specifically to annoy me personally. There's no other explanation that makes sense.

Hypercolor doesn't ring a bell--got a pointer?

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

So this would be the Misanthropic Principle? :D

http://www.boingboing.net/2006/02/12/flickr_group_produce.html

[georgmi.livejournal.com]

Naw, misanthropy would suggest that the universe exists to annoy people in general. I'm pretty sure that any annoyance of people other than me is merely collateral damage. Add in the fact that when I entertain notions of creationism at all, I am a pure solipsist, and you get a nicely accurate model for my behavior, attitudes, and, scarily, experiences. :)

Ah. I was aware of the HDR plugin in PS CS2 (yet another example of the universe annoying me--I had designed just such a plugin, using almost exactly the same algorithm, and had started talking with a developer buddy of mine about actually writing it, when I discovered it already existed.), but I haven't used it myself yet (still on PS CS). I can see how it could easily be used to produce hypersaturated colors, but doing so would initially be a failure of the process--HDR imaging defaults should be to produce "realistic" color saturation.

As a side note, I have gotten similar effects by scanning some of my old negative film that has deteriorated slightly, and spent a good deal of time trying to mitigate the effect. :)

[gwywnnydd.livejournal.com]

Apparently I am the only one who dislikes the color of those lights :). The blue-white bulbs hurt my eyes...

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

Normally I'm not a fan of them either, but these are okay. My first reaction when I saw them was "Jesus, they gave me an OR to work in" but they've grown on me.

[badger.livejournal.com]

Let's see: tall, skinny, spiky on top: yup, you're a triffid.

[kickaha.livejournal.com]

*points finger*

SKREEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!

Oh wait, wrong classic SF movie.

I get that *all* the time from you humans....

[badger.livejournal.com]

The pod people things were plants too, as well as the PK Dick story "The Father-Thing". Hmm. *googles* Ok, the PKD story was two years prior to the _Invasion of the Body Snatchers_ film, but the film was based on another story entirely.