Truth In Packaging - Or Down The Rabbit Hole

on December 08, 2020
An aside: There is a chap in Canada - a gentleman from Quebec - who has made a practice lately of looking carefully at all the printed signs and official literature to see that it conforms with the two-languages policy that has been law there for many years. When finds a breach - like the failure to put the French word for " press " on the button of a public water fountain - he institutes a lawsuit and frequently makes a nice little earner from a suitably sympathetic Quebec judge. In this fine public spirit I set out to see if the advertised specification on the side of a set of IKEA lightbulbs was accurate. I did not have time to wait the 15,000 hours they promise as burning time, but I could measure the colour temperature. Or rather, Adobe Lightroom could. The experiment was simple - a dark room, illumination by two IKEA articulating-arm lamps and two of the RYET LED lamps. They were marked as delivering a colour temperature of 2700º K. I set up Neuschwanstein and the Suzi for a spread of colour on a white scoop. Picture A is the set under an custom white balance - Picture B under a set 2700º K. B looked noticeably yellower than A - was I on a winner here? Possibly not, as the images were SOOOTC jpegs. I took their accompanying RAW files through Lightroom. It has a readout of colour temp at which the shot was made. A was 2700º. So was B - 2700º...But the thing that had fooled me was the tint. It was +15 toward the magenta on A and -3 toward the green on B. Once I had boosted B to + 15 they were identical. Which is correct? Philosophically, probably both of them...but I favour A for tabletop results. Not enough in it there for a French-Canadian lawsuit. Note that this rabbit hole has been brought to you by insomnia. We're told that lying unsleepy at 2:00 AM is caused in some part by the blue light emitted by our computer and tablet screens. A number of makers now include night time tints to try to reduce this. I invested in 2700º K LED lightbulbs for every lamp in the photography room. With the custom WB control in operation I can shoot tabletop with no problems even if the general atmosphere is fairly yellow. Whether turning it into a cave lit by rush torches makes a difference to sleeping remains to be seen. It has the disadvantage that it makes the coffee pot hard to find.
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