Lighting differences

[satin]

<p style=”text-align: center;”>Is there really any differences between lighting things with tungsten than LED? I’ve been said that tungsten is better for lighting skin, but is it truly a great advantage over LED? Also tungsten could get very hot in some interiors. Probably I will sound ignorant, but wouldn’t it be better to always use LED? Due to it’s practicallity</p>

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[satin]

Also, this is not a question just for Mr. Deakins I would like to know the opinion of a lot of people from this forum please. Thank you, very much

[dmullenasc]

Sure, there are differences in color rendition from using bi-color, RGB, RGBW, etc. LEDs and tungsten light — you can see that by looking at spectrum chart, the cheaper LEDs have a “spikey” RGB plot.  As they add more color LEDs outside of RGB, they fill in some of the gaps and create a smoother range.  On skin tones, you may see the effect of less saturation from LEDs or too much saturation in some wavelength range (some lean towards adding too much magenta to skin for example).  When a source light is not continuous-spectrum enough, you lose some color complexity and richness — that can lead to a somewhat blander “band-aid tan/pink” rendition in Caucasian skin for example. But as I said, LEDs are getting better all the time in addressing this.

Practically-speaking, sure, LEDs are far too useful to be ignored and most of the time, the effect on skin tones is not noticed unless one does a side-by-side comparison with tungsten.

Tim Kang does a lot of research into this:

[satin]

Thank you very much for the information. It is very useful!

[Stip]

As David said, LED technology is advancing fast. You can get very affordable units today that render good and accurate enough colours. If you get a relatively new LED light by one of the established LED film-light manufacturers, I don’t think you need to worry about color rendition these days.

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