I talk a lot about LEDs and their pros/cons (mostly pros in my book) but obviously this is a heated discussion among enthusiasts. I decided to try an experiment and do different configurations of stock incandescent bulbs, along with a warm white and cool white LEDs and even a mixture. Can you tell the difference? What do you think looks best?
Before I show you a video of the process, here are random pictures of the backglass of Paragon with different lighting configurations. If you don’t want to know which is which, don’t scroll down too far…
Ok, below is the same experiment done on video.. and if you scroll down farther, you will see the lighting configurations revealed… NOTE that the order of the light configuration in the video is not in the same sequence as the A, B, C pictures. I mixed them up for the pictures so people could try and guess first without knowing.
What do YOU think? You can also leave comments on Youtube here: https://youtu.be/Rjl4fi7t8I4
I noticed be looking at the white object in the background, these images where shot with an auto white balance setting. This would mean the camera is trying to balance the color of the image with every picture. This makes the images a little misleading, since we are talking about the color temperature of the bulbs, taking the pictures with auto white balance on changes the color we see.
There are two ways I can suggest to take this pictures.
A: with a fixed white balance setting, like sunny white balance. Sunlight is what most of us perceive as “white” light, it will do a good job of representing the color, of different light sources. However, the drawback is the color of the light sources will look more saturated than they would to your eye.
B: Adjusting the white balance for the bulbs themselves. This is more difficult, but since the primary light source for the colors we see from the back glass in a dark room is the bulbs, if you balance the color temperature of the camera to the actual bulbs, you will get a pretty accurate representation of the colors your eyes would see from the backlighting. (this would require setting a custom white balance from the light source behind the back glass before each picture of the back glass.
Thanks for the very interesting and informative reply. I’ll definitely look more into this.
Obviously white balance is important but since I used the same/camera settings for all pictures we have at least some point of comparison.