Lets Talk Tints

Actually, even color-calibration won’t capture the full color space that the human eye sees. For example, RGB monitors (or images) can never show a true yellow color, such as a dandelion flower. Yellow on a monitor will always appear somewhat greenish.

I also find that images tend to exaggerate the tint imperfections more than what my eyes see. Cree LED tints will look greener than they really are, for example.

That said, it’s still quite useful to see images of tints, side-by-side, for comparison. If gives us an idea what the color will look like in person, and if nothing else it gives us a worst-case.

It’s not a matter of getting your head wrapped around your opinion.

I think we, the customers should stop buying cool white lights.
We must teach companies what to put inside.
Unfortunately 90% from people are not familiar with this.

Yeah, but for some reason, newbies tend to actually prefer cool white. And non-flashaholics make up the vast majority of the market.

The best we can hope for is that good companies will produce some neutral tints (or warm), along with their standard cool white. Which is what we’re getting, for the most part. It’s certainly better than a few years ago.

Fo’ shizzle, my nizzle.

The human aye does have the ability to “adapt” to changing light conditions. Classic example being horribly blue snow. Snap a pic of a snowscape which looks like perfectly white snow to you when taking the shot, and yet the pic will pretty much show mounds of blueberry Sno-Cones.

Or anything in white (eg, a house) that’s in shade, when warm sunrise/sunset light makes everything look orange. Fascinating pic where directly-lit things are orangey, yet the white house in shade looks blue!

What I’ve personally experienced, though, is looking at woodgrain furniture and whatnot, under CW light, and to me it looks dull bluish-gray, but after switching to a 4300K light (non-high-CRI), those reds and browns just “pop”.

2000K (candlelight) makes for great mood-lighting. Yeah, everything looks orange, but at the end of the day, in the dark except for a 2000K emitter (or coupla candles), it just feels good.

Horrible color-rendition, yeah, but it feels good.

If you take a nice 50W halogen light, and put a light green filter on it (say 10%), when you walk into the room everything will look greenish, of course. But after being there a while (and adapting), you’ll see colors more or less normally, and will be able to discern blue from red from yellow just fine.

With a heavily saturated green filter, you might as well be lighting the place with a green LED, and everything will look green regardless.

That’s why in the previous example I gave, snow (in shade or even at night) will look just plain white, while pix of said show will show them to be horribly blue.

Because the damnfools want “LED” light, and to not look like Yet Another Incandescent.

Same principle applies to those blue headlights…

Truth.
And the reason is because our eyes prefer worm tint when lux (lumens) are at low levels.

A friend sent me what might become the ultimate tint snob's argument

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/labs/articles/27751961

Oh then they should have forbidden mercury and fluorescent tube lamps if blue light would be that dangerous

Also then daylight needs to be forbidden to look at

Those lights and the sun emit UV light which is far more dangerous for human eyes

High pressure mercury

Still like the tint of my 2014 D25C 219b (4500k?) nichia best. Just got my copper tool nichia and its maybe a bit to rosy, but it does suit the copper.

Realy hated the tint of the nichias in my S41, but after slicing the domes the tint is much better, now a bit yellow instead of fugly green.

I take it you are talking about a Low CRI LED?

some backstory on “tint”. color temperature, white balance, “neutral tint”, “neutral white”… etc:

from this thread

I also recommend reading this thread:

fwiw, the 219c tends to be Yellower, than the 219b which tends to be more Pink. That is, the tint of the 219c tends to fall above the BBL, and the 219b tends to fall below the BBL

however, there is no consistency. LEDs vary

here are 3 different lights with N219b, left to right, Astrolux M01, Astrolux M02, Lumintop Worm

Is the sun as we view it truly a perfect black body radiation source?

With all the new members joining to find their place on the GB list for the Q8, and the generalized misinformation regarding color tint vs. temperature, CREE vs. Nichia, HiCri vs. Who gives a hoot?…
…….a thread like this should not remain dormant for so long.

Similar to how we all have individual fingerprints, we each should have been born with retinas containing from 100-120 million rod cells not sensitive to color, the spaces between them harboring from 6-7 million color cones in varying and relative ‘color sensitive’ quantities.
Those of us who can distinguish color at all, visualize temperatures, tints, and color fidelity in our own unique manners.
Regardless of whether or not the sun can claim to be a perfect black body radiator, elements on the surface of the sun, and our atmosphere are always busy altering what we see. Water vapor, pollution, latitude affecting thickness of the atmospheric layer, season of the year, refractive index influenced by time of day, reflection from water and other surfaces remove any doubt that varying influences are at work.

Starting with illustrations demonstrating some of what is responsible for these absorption bands, in the final illustrations wavelength densities (color components) at varying temperatures are shown in their relation to idealized black body lines.






interesting charts, thanks for posting them
so, if I look at the one above, it seems 5000k is pretty evenly balanced between red and blue
6000k has more blue than red, and 4000k has more red than blue

in LEDs, it seems the 6000k options are generally Low CRI, while the 4-5000k come in High CRI… (such as in the AAA Lumintop Copper Tool and Worm, and AAA L11c w N219b)

the tradeoff for CCT going lower, is brightness goes lower. The above lights max out at about 90 lumens on my meter (not talking specs, I did actual tests), with NoPWM. (but the L11c is not regulated)

can we list some other lights with NoPWM that offer 4-6000k of High CRI, using more powerful cells (CR123 and 18650) capable of 200+ lumen brightness, flat regulated for no less than 1 hour runtime?:slight_smile:

CRI has nothing to do with color temperature

You can order Cree LEDs at 6500K or 7000K with CRI90 or a Nichia 5700K at CRI 92

here one 6500K with CRI 90

Anyone knows what kind of tint does my Fenix E11 Gen 1 have? (https://www.amazon.com/Fenix-E11-Compact-Lumen-Flashlight/dp/B005GW8UC2) 4000k, 4500k, 5000k or 5500k?

Edit: Taken on iPhone 6s with default settings.

Maybe your camera setting would help. I will guess 5000K

Hmm, I wonder…

Adjust the camera’s (ostensibly accurate) WB (in K) ’til the resulting beam is the best balance of R=G=B. Wonder if that would line up with the nominal CT of the LED itself.