5600K LED is the way of the future?

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Jon Furtado

Jon Furtado

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While I was on the NAB show floor yesterday, I stumbled across the Filmgear booth. http://filmgear.net/

Their PowerLED lights were pretty insane. He was able to hit the convention center ceiling with his pannel! The Birns and Sawyer rep was on hand chatting about LED with me for a while and he said that 5600K (daylight) will now be the absolute standard. That film was 3200K but now with digital taking over everything, it favors daylight over tungsten. I had never heard this and was curious what everyone else thinks. He mentioned that the only reason we still see tons of Tungsten lights on sets are because studios have millions invested in them and that they are readily available.

It was a very interesting discussion about a fundamental shift in the industry. What do you guys think? Do you mostly use daylight in your lighting kit? Will this fundamental shift start taking over more and more since digital becomes the defacto standard over film?
 
When shooting with RED and Alexa..I tend to shoot Daylight sources (not LED though).

This is a departure for me as mainly a tabletop and food shooter...but it works for those sensors.
 
Depends... since most of my shoots tend to be interviews and a bit of the run and gun variety, I have a Coolights fluorescent softbox with lamps for both temps, and daylight gels for my tungsten lights. But all things being equal, I prefer how daylight looks (usually) to tungsten, when white balanced properly. Can't really put my finger on why, though... it just seems a bit more naturally warmer, I guess.
 
If you're going for a warm, incandescent look, shooting with 3200K tungsten lights is a good way to produce the desired color balance in-camera. But if you intend to white-balance tungsten lighting to make it look like daylight, you'll be underexposing the blue photosites in the image sensor, and the result can be more grainy and noisy in the blue channel. That's because 3200K tungsten light is deficient in the blue end of the visible spectrum:

tungsten.png

With digital image sensors, using wide-spectrum light 5000-6000K will produce more balanced histogram levels in the Red, Green, and Blue channels than other types of light. I prefer 5000K myself, as it's a bit warmer than most LED lights and I think it produces more natural looking skin tones.
 
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