I cannot understand color temperature

nouou

nouou

Well-known member
The only reference I've read on the subject is that bare bones book, and it introduced the concept to me but I cannot understand how it works. Can someone explain or provide a link as to how this works? Thanks in advance.
 
Yeah a LOT of books and online articles make it way more complicated than it needs to be.

All you need to know is, daylight is about 5500 degrees Kelvin and tungsten is about 3200 degrees Kelvin.

A higher Kelvin temp means colder (bluer) while a lower Kelvin temp means warmer (more orange).

Spend more time learning how to correct daylight and tungsten with camera filters and lighting gels.

.
 
For the longest time I was baffled by the whole color temp thing. Until I had a heat-transfer class in college (was a mechanical engineering major at the time). So now when people ask about color temp I give them the very complicated version first - cue the confused looks - and then as Chris said it's all about 5500-5600K daylight, 3200K tungsten, CTO and CTB gels.
 
You know how "red" covers a wide range of colors from purple to scarlet? Well white (light) is the same.

Outdoor shade has a lot of blue - candlelight a lot of red, and this gives a color cast to all the objects lit by it. The human brain compensates for this color cast so a white piece of paper looked at in candlelight has only a slight tinge of orange.

The camera lens, is no more capable of making this "correction" than the human eye, some intelligence has to intervene.

IMPORTANT - the brain does not "remove" color casts , it finesses them in very subtle ways.
 
everyone makes that mistake.

colder is orange, and warmer is more blue.
Click to expand...

That makes no sense.

Warmer light is more orange, colder light is more blue. Lower on the Kelvin scale is warm colors, higher on the scale are cooler colors.
 
533px-PlanckianLocus.png


look where the 1500 is and where the 10000 is.
more orange is the start of the temperature, like candle lights, if you bump up the temperature it would go more yellow then more blue like really hot light from an industrial machine or something, or if you look at low and high temps of a strong oven or something.
 
amrrahmy said:
kelvin scale is the temperature.

lower on the kelvin scale is colder, higher on the kelvin scale is warmer.
Click to expand...


Like I said:

"... a LOT of books and online articles make it way more complicated than it needs to be."


When we say "warmer" and "colder" we refer to color (blue is a "cold" color and orange is a "warm" color), not a color temperature in terms of the Kelvin scale. It's been referred to as such for a lot longer than cinematography has even been around.

.
 
Last edited:
Without having to read whole articles about it, just imagine a piece of steel being heated. Is it hotter when it's glowing orange or when it's glowing blue?
That's how color temp is measured, a theoretical "black body" is heated to 2600 degrees Kelvin and it's glowing orange (like a tungsten lamp), then it's heated to 5600 degrees Kelvin (which is really, really hot!) and it's glowing white like the sun.

All you need to keep in mind is that reference: Heated objects (and also flames itself) become more blue as they get hotter.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top