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

[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. :)