Color-Balanced Lighting

One of my "daylight" fluorescent bulbs started flickering badly (annoyingly) as I was completing Simple Beauty the other day. I went to Home Depot to see if they had "Daylight" fluorescents at 48" — since the store I originally bought them from no longer stocked them.

To my delight they not only had what I was looking for [Picture], but also screw-in style incandescent replacements that give off very bright light [Picture] (equivalent to a 100w light bulb in output) consuming only 27w — which is about 68% of what that little light in your oven consumes. And this bulb, which cost me $7 is guaranteed to last 9 years, and save me $73 in energy costs. How they figure that, I don't know, but I fell for it.

Flipping over the packaging for the $6 Philips "Natural Sunshine" 48" tube (they also come in 24" and 18" at Home Depot) I could see that the color rating was 5000k. (Kelvin)

Kelvin is a color temperature measurement; color accuracy can be seen best in the 5000k to 6500k range, with 6500k being similar to direct sunlight. By the way, Home Depot also sells 6500k "Daylight Deluxe" tubes also by Philips ($7 for 2!), but I elected to use the 5000k Natural Sunlight, presuming it would be more like indirect sunlight, and perhaps ever-so-slightly warmer. The package shows that on a 1 to 100 scale of the light providing the most accurate color perception, the 5000k Natural Sunshine bulbs were the most accurate, with a rating of 92 [Picture]. So now, with a combination of four 48" bulbs on my ceiling running above and behind me and parallel to the painting surface, plus my new 5000k palette light in an old Luxo [Picture] spring-arm lamp, I have good color-accurate lighting for painting.

The addition of the color-balanced lamp near my palette has eliminated the problem of the palette seemingly in the dark as I mix, since it was noticeably farther from the ceiling lights. All the pictures taken for examples in this case were shot with the digital camera set to point-and-shoot (automatic) and absolutely no color corrections were made. I find them to be extremely, pleasingly accurate.

Click here to see My Annotated Palette.