CRI of lights is definitely a large factor in my purchasing these days. The muting, compressive response of some lights almost pains me at this point.
As this post's author noted white LEDs can be pretty solid. Bulbs that have a mix of white LEDs at various temperatures to be "bi-color" tend to be pretty solid as well. Its once you go towards RGB light bulbs that you tend to get a fairly iffy CRI.
Consider looking at TM-30 as well as CRI, it's a more useful metric that better takes R9 into account. I've gotten a little bit obsessed with colour in the last few months, and have been buying different bulbs for the purpose of making DCP profiles and doing film scanning. What you want, specifically, is violet pumped LEDs. They're expensive and it seems like there are only a handful of them on the market, but they're a lot more balanced spectrally and tend to have low flicker (probably just because they're a premium product).
I sort of wonder is there a "true" way to represent color? Would a intensity over frequency curve do it?
I probably lack the terminology to express myself properly, but color ends up being a very human thing, with a huge focus on primary colors(the colors that match the frequency response of the human eye) This is fine, we are human after all, but then I always feel color theory dives off the deep end, with color wheels and complimentary colors and triplets, etc. why? there is nothing physically cyclic going on. It never makes any sense to me that patterns based on it being cyclic would be any better than just picking colors. Any way, silly rant aside, if we wanted to define an objective physical color format, how would it be done?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black-body_radiation As objects get hotter and start glowing, they start to emit radiation in visible frequencies. Very hot objects keep glowing in the redder parts as they also start to glow in higher bands. Our eyes collect all the various frequencies at different intensities and experience them as one color. The second diagram on the page, with the chromaticity of different temperatures of ideal black-body radiators, shows the color that we perceive as the temperature of the glowing object goes up. The sun is around 5800k, so a little bit in in the yellow-green direction from perfectly balanced color response.
If you want to know why that diagram has its white point where it is, it's based on testing a bunch of people in laboratories. It's fairly predictable and repeatable, but it might not match your experience outdoors.
The vision system has evolved to consider as white the average color of the environment.
In terrestrial environments, the average color is typically not much different from the true color of the Sun. The white light of the Sun is split by the atmosphere into the bluish light of the sky and the yellowish direct light, then those are reflected and diffused by various bodies until being collected by an eye or a photographic camera.
If the bodies in the environment are random enough, i.e. there are similar amounts of those which absorb or diffuse different parts of the spectrum (e.g. the environment includes brown earth, green plants, blue sky, variously colored flowers and fruits, etc.), then the average color of the light that reaches the photoreceptors will not differ much from the color of the original source of light, i.e. the Sun as seen from outside the atmosphere.
> It's probably a good idea to buy a few samples of several different types and brands, test them all, and then decide which to buy in quantity for the home.
I'm looking forward to that. I own a bunch of Philips WhiteDial bulbs that are rated CRI90. It would be nice to test that and know how they really compare. No doubt there's a lot of dishonest CRI ratings out there.
The author describes color rendering index as a percentage; it is not. It's 100 - [a calculation of average color error on 8 color samples]. Reporting the color error directly would probably be better; 90% and 95% would both be pretty good grades on most tests, but a rendering error of 10 sounds a lot worse than a rendering error of 5.
Being based on only 8 samples, CRI Ra doesn't tell the whole story. There are other standards like TLCI that use more samples, and six supplemental samples some sources report. R9 (strong red) and R12 (strong blue) are particularly relevant to modern lighting, as LED sources often struggle with them despite high CRI (Ra) ratings.
CRI is a comparison to blackbody radiation (like an incandescent bulb) or simulated daylight at the same correlated color temperature as the sample light source. An incandescent bulb and midday sunlight at the equator both have CRI of 100, but a CCT of 2700K and a CCT of 5700K will render colors very differently. White balance in a camera's settings or raw development software can make one look like the other.
CCT is roughly blue-yellow balance, but light sources can deviate from blackbody radiation on a red-green axis. This is most often expressed as "delta u v" or "Duv", as it refers to distance in the CIELUV color space[0]. Duv numbers are small, with differences of less than 0.001 being noticeable in a side by side comparison and more than +/- 0.006 falling outside the ANSI standard for white light. Positive numbers are green, and negative numbers are red/pink.
This is awesome. Are ordinary objects bright enough to register their spectra in it?
You might also enjoy this, a project to find real world things with all the cyans you can't display on a computer screen. https://moultano.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/where-to-find-the-... After doing this I was looking for some way to do spectrophotometry with a small enough amount of equipment that my wife would approve of, so that I can add more things to the list and confirm their color.
White light discussion tends to focus around spectrums of perceptual/blackbody/the sun importance because... well, it's just the natural choice. Is there a name for a light source which has a constant emission intensity across a given range of wavelengths? Does such a thing have any practical purpose (beyond being interesting to think about) and do we actually make anything capable of producing such light output? I suppose one way might be to take some incandescent source and then stick a really well tuned filter in front to "level out" the normal curve, but that punts the problem to constructing such a well tuned filter.
Unrelated to TFA, this site is spectacular. I recommend any other HNer here to give a look to the posts in the "andinensis" section, where the author describes homesteading in a semi-remote area in Chile, and generating his own electrical power with a water stream that runs through his property.
I wanted to like this, but the “housewife” comments about sewing buttons and makeup are pretty awful. If we want an inclusive community, this sexist bullshit is not acceptable.
It’s a bummer—I’m fascinated by color theory like this.
A copy of this page should be in every future Physics textbook...
It shows to us just how skewed our (human) perception of light really is.
It also shows to us just how much is going on, in terms of combinations of wavelengths present, with various light sources, and just how different, again, in terms of permutations of constituent waves, any two of them are...
Anyway, a great page that should be included in any future Physics textbook!
18 comments
[ 0.32 ms ] story [ 11.6 ms ] threadAs this post's author noted white LEDs can be pretty solid. Bulbs that have a mix of white LEDs at various temperatures to be "bi-color" tend to be pretty solid as well. Its once you go towards RGB light bulbs that you tend to get a fairly iffy CRI.
I've referenced https://optimizeyourbiology.com/light-bulb-database and https://optimizeyourbiology.com/smart-light-database before when looking at bulbs but if anyone has a better resource, absolutely please drop a reply.
I probably lack the terminology to express myself properly, but color ends up being a very human thing, with a huge focus on primary colors(the colors that match the frequency response of the human eye) This is fine, we are human after all, but then I always feel color theory dives off the deep end, with color wheels and complimentary colors and triplets, etc. why? there is nothing physically cyclic going on. It never makes any sense to me that patterns based on it being cyclic would be any better than just picking colors. Any way, silly rant aside, if we wanted to define an objective physical color format, how would it be done?
If you want to know why that diagram has its white point where it is, it's based on testing a bunch of people in laboratories. It's fairly predictable and repeatable, but it might not match your experience outdoors.
In terrestrial environments, the average color is typically not much different from the true color of the Sun. The white light of the Sun is split by the atmosphere into the bluish light of the sky and the yellowish direct light, then those are reflected and diffused by various bodies until being collected by an eye or a photographic camera.
If the bodies in the environment are random enough, i.e. there are similar amounts of those which absorb or diffuse different parts of the spectrum (e.g. the environment includes brown earth, green plants, blue sky, variously colored flowers and fruits, etc.), then the average color of the light that reaches the photoreceptors will not differ much from the color of the original source of light, i.e. the Sun as seen from outside the atmosphere.
I'm looking forward to that. I own a bunch of Philips WhiteDial bulbs that are rated CRI90. It would be nice to test that and know how they really compare. No doubt there's a lot of dishonest CRI ratings out there.
The author describes color rendering index as a percentage; it is not. It's 100 - [a calculation of average color error on 8 color samples]. Reporting the color error directly would probably be better; 90% and 95% would both be pretty good grades on most tests, but a rendering error of 10 sounds a lot worse than a rendering error of 5.
Being based on only 8 samples, CRI Ra doesn't tell the whole story. There are other standards like TLCI that use more samples, and six supplemental samples some sources report. R9 (strong red) and R12 (strong blue) are particularly relevant to modern lighting, as LED sources often struggle with them despite high CRI (Ra) ratings.
CRI is a comparison to blackbody radiation (like an incandescent bulb) or simulated daylight at the same correlated color temperature as the sample light source. An incandescent bulb and midday sunlight at the equator both have CRI of 100, but a CCT of 2700K and a CCT of 5700K will render colors very differently. White balance in a camera's settings or raw development software can make one look like the other.
CCT is roughly blue-yellow balance, but light sources can deviate from blackbody radiation on a red-green axis. This is most often expressed as "delta u v" or "Duv", as it refers to distance in the CIELUV color space[0]. Duv numbers are small, with differences of less than 0.001 being noticeable in a side by side comparison and more than +/- 0.006 falling outside the ANSI standard for white light. Positive numbers are green, and negative numbers are red/pink.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CIELUV
You might also enjoy this, a project to find real world things with all the cyans you can't display on a computer screen. https://moultano.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/where-to-find-the-... After doing this I was looking for some way to do spectrophotometry with a small enough amount of equipment that my wife would approve of, so that I can add more things to the list and confirm their color.
I'd like to see this done for kit like ADJ / Eliminator / Chauvet, they do some wild near-UV shit to cause really cool/blown out color definitions.
It has been shared here before as well.
It’s a bummer—I’m fascinated by color theory like this.
It shows to us just how skewed our (human) perception of light really is.
It also shows to us just how much is going on, in terms of combinations of wavelengths present, with various light sources, and just how different, again, in terms of permutations of constituent waves, any two of them are...
Anyway, a great page that should be included in any future Physics textbook!