The Biggest Lie in Color Photography: Why Your Camera Can't Capture True Colors
The Color of White Light
An engineer builds a DIY spectrograph to expose the fundamental flaw in color photography: capturing only red, green, and blue light. The article explores how different light sources—from LEDs to gas discharge lamps—produce wildly different spectra, and why this makes color reproduction a constant battle. It includes spectra from vintage and modern LEDs, incandescent bulbs, halogen lamps, and even a blue-tinted "daylight" bulb, showing that true color fidelity is elusive.
The biggest lie in color photography is that you can accurately represent the colors of objects by simply recording the amount of red, green and blue in them.
- somat
I sort of wonder is there a "true" way to represent color? Would a intensity over frequency curve do it?
I probably lack the terminology to express myself properly, but color ends up being a very human thing, with a huge focus on primary colors(the colors that match the frequency response of the human eye) This is fine, we are human after all, but then I always feel color theory dives off the deep end, with color wheels and complimentary colors and triplets, etc. why? there is nothing physically cyclic going on. It never makes any sense to me that patterns based on it being cyclic would be any better than just picking colors. Any way, silly rant aside, if we wanted to define an objective physical color format, how would it be done?
- miladyincontrol
CRI of lights is definitely a large factor in my purchasing these days. The muting, compressive response of some lights almost pains me at this point.
As this post's author noted white LEDs can be pretty solid. Bulbs that have a mix of white LEDs at various temperatures to be "bi-color" tend to be pretty solid as well. Its once you go towards RGB light bulbs that you tend to get a fairly iffy CRI.
I've referenced https://optimizeyourbiology.com/light-bulb-database and https://optimizeyourbiology.com/smart-light-database before when looking at bulbs but if anyone has a better resource, absolutely please drop a reply.
- deadlast2
Sun is white light. Wonder what that means. Brightest object in out awareness is modeled as clean white. Or is this the actual basic color.