Whether you need to worry about CRI or not depends on how fussy you are. If you are shooting products (including fashion) for a living you would (or should, anyway) be fussy and CRI is critical. Also if you shoot people and like your skin tones to be well rendered, or natural.
So if you find that don't really care about CRI then any old light sources will do and buying random LED bulbs until you get the results you like will be fine. But if you, like me, really do care about CRI then I suggest you stick to LED panels and bulbs that are made for photography. Avoid all the consumer products (eg whatever's on sale at Walmart). LEDs that are made for commercial store displays have better CRI because they care about colour rendition for stuff they are selling. I have some of those by way of Amazon and they have surprisingly nice light. See what B&H Photo or Adorama has available in your price range. The 500 and 1000 LED panels are reasonably priced these days and put out a lot of good light. Fotodiox is a more budget source with good strong lights. Many photo LED panels use DC power, so definitely no flicker. AC powered ones? Dunno. Where I notice CRI making a huge difference is when I shoot with a calibrated colour workflow -- ie using a colour-checker card, and calibrating the monitor with a colorimeter. Then I can really see what normal consumer room lights do to skin versus shooting with strobes that have a very high CRI. I can even tell the difference between shooting with Profoto pack and head strobes and the less expensive Paul Buff lights. On Mon, Feb 27, 2017 at 3:30 PM, Mark C <pdml-m...@charter.net> wrote: > Does anyone here have advice about selecting LED lights for studio work? > > I've tried several consumer bands with mixed results. I understand that the > color rendering index (CRI) rating is supposed indicate how well the bulb > displays colors, but my experience so far has not shows any strong > correlation between that actual results. > > So far I've tried 4 different brands of bulbs, with the best results coming > from Earthtronic bulbs with a mediocre CRI 81 and the worst coming from GE > Reveal with a respectable CRI 93. IMO, the Reveal bulb was the least > accurate of all four brands that I tried in terms of color rendition and > also banded noticeably (do LEDs flicker?) > > So - how do you tell what LED's will work the best - or it just trial and > error? > > Mark > > > -- > PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List > PDML@pdml.net > http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net > to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and > follow the directions. -- -bmw -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net to UNSUBSCRIBE from the PDML, please visit the link directly above and follow the directions.
