F&V K4000 anyone use?

[5Delicious]

What your post tells me, is that I really do have to invest in a good light meter so I can measure things for myself and go from there... I guess the expenses never end

Oh, and btw if you have a DSLR, you already have a great light meter. Canon's auto white balance is particularly good, and will adjust not only cool/warm, but also dial out green/magenta spikes with ease. In fact, if you only ever set your camera to Auto White Balance, and you're only using one kind of LED, you may not even notice the green cast because the camera will dial it out.

Here's a quick and dirty method to use AWB to test for green spike. Set the camera up in live view mode, and while looking at the LCD, simply switch between Kelvin and auto while dialing the Kelvin temperature to the closest possible match. If you find a Kelvin temperature setting where the color on the screen does not change at all between auto and Kelvin, then congrats -- your light requires no correction.

On the other hand, if you can get close, but there always seems to be a shift of some sort, that is because the camera is making settings along the green/magenta axis that your manual Kelvin setting cannot account for. If this happens, grab a sheet of 1/8 magenta and drape it over the lights and do the test again. If there's a still a shift, try 1/4. And so on. You will quickly find the spot where there's no shift, and your lights will be balanced. As balanced as they can be, anyway!

Finally, if you take a test still, there's actually a truckload of color metering information hidden in the exif data that most image editing applications simply do not display. Here's a sample (attached). You have all kinds of cool details on what color temperature the camera measured versus what it actually selected, what picture style and settings were used, and so on. This data was output by the OS X droplets listed here:

http://www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool/

You just drag your .jpg onto the droplet and up pops a text document with all the details. Awesome tool...

 

[OldCorpse]

Thanks, 5Delicious - good stuff. On a complete tangent, I have 7 YN-300 lights. I was thinking of buying 2 more for a total of 9, and then doing an array of them in a three rows by three on a grid take off the barn doors and try to get them as close to each other as possible, so that it's one big panel of 9 lights, and then throwing it inside a softbox with a quarter stop silk in front. That would be like a $700 daylight box. Only problem - a bit fiddly with all the batteries and stuff, but if one could at least coordinate the remote brightness on all of them with one control...

 

[BillyAnt]

Has anyone compared these to Adorama's Flashpoint CL-1300's? On brightness and color accuracy? They are $409 plus $60 for barn doors. One review says the CL-1300's are a bit magenta but quite bright. They also have a filter slot. I've shot with some NOVAK 1x1 LED lights and always use the barn doors.

 

[Patryk_Rebisz]

About a year and a half i started purchasing LEDs. At this point in my career i wanted quality rather than price so obviously i went with LitePanels.

So here are some facts about LPs:
- even LitePanel LEDs vary from one light to another (i have 4 and they all differ slightly)
- tungsten LEDs (or daylight gelled to tungsten) will ALWAYS have worse color rendition than daylight (this is also confirmed by LP customer service rep)
- because tungsten LEDs have extra filter build in they will ALWAYS be dimmer than daylight LED
- how much of green cast you see depends on the light AND what camera you use (RED for instance is specifically prone to show green cast even using LitePanels)
- the brighter the LED the less color accurate it will be - that's why LitePanel is very careful about speaking about their brightness because there is plenty of LEDs that are brighter (but not as color accurate)

Overall, in a pinch using daylight LEDs as the key on your talent is not so bad, using tungsten LEDs (or gelled daylight) will need some green spike correction. Thus I use LEDs as back light and accent light but hardly ever as key.