color temperature

C

chand

New member
hi,

can someone please help me out?

I know that 3200K is orange and 5600K is blue. And some of my friends told me that in between 3200K and 5600K you have yellow then green. However, I saw on the internet so many Kelvin scales that say that in between 3200K and 5600K you have white.

In Blaine Brown's "Cinematography Theory and Practice" book it says green. But in most of the color temperature charts on the internet it says white. So I'm really confused.

So what color exactly is in between 3200K and 5600K?


Thanks for your help
 
You can look up the scale online. It looks like both exist in that range, according to some of the charts.
 
This is definitely an area of a lot of confusion. You can also find some resources on my website blog area dealing with color temperature and CRI.

In a nutshell, you have color temperature and you have CRI which are two different things and measured differently. Color temperature is really the measure of the shift between red and blue in pure white (in the ideal--hardly anything is ideal though). Although some may not agree with me, I like to think of the the shift between green and magenta as really more what CRI (color rendering) indicates. Electronic lighting is a simulation of the ideal and CRI tells us how close we got to the ideal on a scale of 1 to 100 (100 being the best of course). The closer you get to balanced, where you don't need a magenta or green correction, the closer to ideal you are within the white area (within the red to blue shift of color temp that is).

For instance, in some of the highest CRI electronic lighting this correction is already built in and would be pretty close to 100 in the ability to render colors in a true fashion. 90 is certainly easy to find these days in photographic grade lighting. 70 to 80ish is common in the commercial lighting world.

A side note: the higher the CRI in electronic lighting, the less lumen output as the green spike is most responsible for higher lumen output. The more we engineer or "shift" that out, the less lumen output and the more we have to make up for it some how else. Mostly by driving the electronic source harder or whatever--thats another story.

The best color temperature meters out there can handle both shifts well, like the Kenko (formerly Minolta) for example. It can tell you both color temperature and the shift you need to make to correct in the green/magenta area. Thus, it can only indirectly tell you about CRI though by looking at the green/magenta shift value. You could only do an approximation at best of what your CRI is. I find it a good thing to have around but you still can't beat a spectrograph and integrating sphere for the most accurate measurement and reading of color temperature and also CRI.
 
chand said:
I know that 3200K is orange and 5600K is blue. And some of my friends told me that in between 3200K and 5600K you have yellow then green. However, I saw on the internet so many Kelvin scales that say that in between 3200K and 5600K you have white.
Click to expand...

I'd say 3200K is white, 5600K is white, and in between there's whiter shades of pale ;)

Just kidding. But not exactly wrong either, because when you white balance correctly, every step on the Kelvin scale can be your reference white.
 
The irony is color temperature isn't for specifying color at all. It describes multi-spectral or full spectrum white light from one end of its scale to the other. Actual colors are described in terms of wavelengths not color temperature / kelvin.
 
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