5000 K LED flashlight with high CRI and CCT ratings

<p>I intend to do some night or dawn/dusk photography with artificial light other than flash, sometimes to selectively paint with light. The market seems flooded (no pun intended) with all sorts of flashlights of differing size, power, beam width and cost. High color uniformity (CRI) and consistency are no doubt a plus but I am seeing few flashlights with such qualities. Have you found an LED light that can provide that and with variable power and possibly variable beam width? How easy has it been to correct for any problems later in post processing? </p>

<p>What would be a setup to test what we have? - Would it mean taking close ups of the flashlight lit passport color checker?<br>

I honestly haven't looked for (color)photographic qualities in my LED flashlights yet.</p>

<p>Found this YouTube video in a search for high CRI LED flashlight...

<p>Jump to the Sundrop flashlight segment at around 2:50 in.</p>

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<p>Jochen, I am not familiar with the passport color checker but I have an old MacBeth color chart that might be useful in the same sense. One or the other may be useful in tests of current equipment, as you say. One of the problems with many LED lights is that they emit a cold color which may not be desirable in color photographs. I am attaching a photo made with a cheap key chain LED light in October while on vacation (Fill light on deckchairs during long night exposure) that shows a blue cast.</p>

<p>Tim, thank you for the video which seems to shows that the McGizmo Sundrop is a good light, although its range for some applications (like lighting of architecture, large trees, groups of people) may not be sufficient. Its floodlight projection at short range can be useful though. Light painting does not usually require lighting large areas at a distance, but a powerful narrow beam would seem to be useful for long throws. I believe that the Sundrop and the Eagle Tac Clicky both use the Nichia (083?) emitter that has a very high CRI (over 90). The Eagle Tac comes in at less than $100 while I think the Sundrop retails for 5X that amount. As I will likely need more than one light of differing projection capabilities (narrow versus flood) and night photography is only one approach for me, cost is important. Two flashlights for a total price of $200 including a set of batteries would be ideal. </p>

<p>I will be doing B&W photos as well as color and the exact color of the light will likely be somewhat less important for the monochrome work. Some good reviews of light painting can be found by simply Googling those words while some discussion of LED flashlights for light painting I found googling 'Light painting flashlight reviews.'</p>

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<p>Here's a CCchart color rendering example I just rattled off using my Jetbeam II I.B.S. LED flashlight with a Cree chip element. It was shot in Program mode and white balanced with a camera profile applied to the Raw Pentax PEF file. No other adjustments.</p>

<p>With a little HSL adjustments you can almost get D50 spectra rendering, but that's not always desirable with peculiarly lit shots of this sort. I paid around $80 for my Jetbeam LED flashlight.</p><div></div>

<p>Here's the corrected version applying HSL and white balance edits to get R=G=B CCchart gray patches and get rid of the blue/greenish cast in some of the rest of the colors in the chart...</p><div></div>

<p>Tim, although I haven't seen any CRI values or a proximity to D50 or D55 for the Jetbeam II or other Jetbeams (I guess that photography is not their main market) your unit does seem to provide quite good reproduction (one can see a green tint in the stalk of the bush) with minimal post exposure work. The color chart seems quite similar before and after tuning in Photoshop (the white and greys seem quite pure). Thanks for the examples and the unit is delivered free to Canada (my neck of the woods) for only $102 CAN (except that supplier seems back ordered). With long exposures and waving the light over different or separately lighting different areas I imagine that any hot spot of this or other flashlights is of negligible effect.</p>

<p>Here are two shots of a colour swatch and Kodak colour patches taken in full sunlight (top) and with a cheap LED worklight (below). The LED light had a CT approaching 10,000K, but after correction gives what I feel to be a reasonable CRI. The CT could easily be reduced with an amber filter or gel, either on the camera or LED lamp.</p>

<p>The colour swatch is made up of paint sample colours, which are therefore what printers call "Spot colours", rather than the CMYK matrix that the Kodak patches use. These colour strips can be picked up in hardware/decorating shops for free BTW.</p><div></div>

<p>Thanks T.L. and R.J. for those examples It looks like most LED flashlights could be corrected to 5000 K or thereabouts, so other considerations such as beam width modification, variable lumen output possibility, or maximum range might be more important. This is fine when the LED is the major light source within the photo.</p>

<p>Color balancing can be a problem when the LED is being used as a fill light (my photo is not the best example, but does show a mismatch between the nighttime ambient and the artificial light on the white deckchairs). Perhaps the answer, if it is desired that the fill light and the ambient light match each other, is to use various degrees of warming filters (CC or the equivalent) on the daylight light source LED emitter, or alternatively to have more than one LED flashlight of different color temperatures available, depending upon the light color of the ambient light to which the LED might want to be correlated. CC filters might be hard to come by, perhaps color gels less so, but several flashlights of good specifications and differing color temperature might also be an appreciable investment. Are these the two best options or are there others?</p>

Hi, I've measured spectral output on about a dozen "white" LED sources over the years, and they all followed the same spectral pattern - a

broad "spike" in the bluish region plus a broad spread in greenish-red range, and a large dip between the two. It seems as though color

balance (CCT) is adjusted by changing the relative proportions of the two. (I helped investigate this as for a portrait chain; we concluded

that the dip makes current white LED not good enough for high quality portrait work.)

 

Anyway, the current white LEDs can't perfectly match skylight-type sources. That said, for most practical purposes you can just filter as

Rodeo Joe suggests. I would personally try out what they call CTO (color temperature, orange) an CTB (same thing, but blue). Roscoe

includes an assortment in their sample books, which used to be handed out freely, but may now sell for a dollar or two. They're small, a bit

longer than the window of a hot shoe flash, but may be large enough to experiment with. Larger sheets are available when you know what

you want. They come in "full strength," which I THINK converts daylight to halogen and vice versa, as well as 3/4, 1/2, 1/4, etc. This way you

don't need a casefull of LEDs.

 

I wouldn't trust too much in CRI value for these things - from what I've seen they're all fundamentally similar in spectral quality aside from

adjusting the relative balance of the bluish vs the greenish-red component. (If this sounds cryptic, look up spectral power distribution for

LEDs, and see if it makes more sense.) Ps, if they eventually find a phosphor to fill in that spectral dip, this will change. Best wishes with

your experiments.

<p>Rodeo Joe, can you post the unedited version lit by the LED work light so we can see just how much editing is involved?</p>

<p>What was the rated Lumens output of your cheap work light? With flashlights including mine the adjusting head that controls the beam spread and diffusion does most of the color correcting. When I unscrew the head off that Jetbeam the color cast on my white walls turns pinkish blue violet far from the slightly warm yellow neutral. That's a lot of color correcting.</p>

<p>Adding a color filter in front of the head will definitely reduce lumens and reach of the beam.</p>

[Tim] "Adding a color filter in front of the head will definitely reduce lumens and reach of the beam."

 

This is definitely true. But don't overlook that the function of the color-temp filter is to remove the colors which are present in excess. Large

light losses only occur when the light source has a large excess of unwanted color. If your portable light source starts out close to the

existing light, the filter loss can be pretty small. Anyway, it can be a pretty affordable way to experiment.