Why use adjustable color-temperature lights if you can shoot RAW and fix white balance later?

Asked 6/6/2020

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If budget were not a concern, why would a photographer or videographer choose a bi-color or variable color-temperature light (for example, roughly 2700K to 6000K) instead of a fixed-color light, especially when shooting RAW and using high-CRI lighting? What professional advantages do adjustable lights offer, and which features matter most in practice?

Originally by Photography Stack Exchange contributor. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

Photography Stack Exchange contributor

6y ago

2 Answers

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Lets start with some background stuff to bring all the things together:

Lights used for photography has a certain spectrum of colored light. The closer the composition is to that of natural light, the better the color rendition. This is expressed with the CRI. Cheap LED lights with low CRI sometimes lack some of the spectrum, which then leads to strange or party missing colors, especially in skin tones, which is very hard to correct.

However, natural or full spectrum light also shifts in color during the day due to the interaction with the atmosphere. This shift in color in orange/blue can be equalized via the white balance.

Color Temperature, Source Wikipedia

The other balance that we can encounter, is magenta/green which occurs to a lesser extend and can be used to counter color cast of e.g. fluorescent lamps.

         magenta
  red      |
           |
           |
yellow ----+---- blue
           |
           |
           |     cyan
         green

So much for the background. But back to you question: Why can you adjust the color temperature?

If you are using the lights indoor with no other lights, then you never need to adjust the lights at all. You would just dial in their color temp in your camera and be done.

However, it becomes much more difficult if you want to mix the artificial light with natural light or other lights like tungsten lamps.

While our eyes are very well trained to cope with white balance, if they encounter mixed lighting, they fail. So will your camera. You will either perceive some light as blaring blueish or as almost orange, depending on the dominating light source.

This can be used creatively for storytelling, e.g. to underline the cozyness of a home via warm light, but it will ruin your shot if you just wanted to create an evenly lit scene.

For this reason you can set the color temp on some lights, so that you can match the color temp of the lights you cannot adjust.

If you have a light, that is not adjustable, you can use colored gels to change the color temp. There are orange gels, which are called CTO (Color Temperature Orange) and blue ones, called CTB (Color Temperature Blue).

So if you have ever seen a photographer using an orange filter on his speedlight, while taking shots at an indoors event, this is exactly the same thing: To avoid ending up with very pale and blueish looking people ind a warmly lit room, they adjust the light of the speedlight to match the color temperature, giving the picture a more natural look.

Originally by user88965. Source · Licensed CC BY-SA 4.0

user88965

6y ago

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AI Answer

Generated from our catalog & community — verify before relying on it.

Adjustable color temperature is useful because white balance correction only fixes overall color balance; it cannot restore missing parts of the spectrum. That’s why high CRI matters: low-CRI LEDs can render some colors poorly—especially skin tones—and those missing or distorted colors are hard to fix in post.

A variable-color light helps professionals match the ambient light already in a scene. Natural light shifts from warmer to cooler during the day, and artificial sources can vary too. Being able to set a light warmer or cooler lets you blend it with existing light instead of fighting mixed color casts later.

There’s also more than one type of color shift. Besides the orange/blue axis handled by color temperature and white balance, there can also be a magenta/green shift, often seen with fluorescent lighting. A good lighting system should help control or compensate for those casts as well.

So the main professional benefit is not that adjustable lights replace post-processing, but that they let you create a better, more consistent starting point in-camera. The most important features are strong color accuracy/high CRI and the ability to adjust color temperature predictably to match the scene.

UniqueBot

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6y ago

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