LEDs Offer Enhanced Color Tuning

Retailers are well aware that good lighting is critical to visually rendering and calling attention to merchandise, including the role of color rendering. Light is made up of colors. For us to see an object as blue, that color must be present in the object and the light itself.

Most electric white-light sources don’t produce light with a balanced color spectrum, however. They’re manufactured with varying relative intensities of colors. This choice provides control of color appearance of the light source and how objects in the space appear.

The key metric here is color temperature, which may be warm-white (e.g., 2800K), neutral-white (e.g., 3500K) or cool-white (e.g., 5000K). Warmer light sources bring out warmer colors such as red and orange. Cooler sources bring out cooler colors such as blue and green.

However, after installation, typically color can’t be changed without replacing all of the lamps or fitting luminaires with color filters or separately controlled warm and cool lamps.

The rapid development of LED lighting technology makes this capability much easier and more economical to implement. These white-light color tuning products feature separately dimmable arrays of warm- and cool-white LEDs or separately dimmable colors mixed with white-output LEDs. The latter provides the capability of achieving a wide range of saturated colors besides white and its varied shades.

Combined with appropriate lighting controls, this capability allows retailers to change the shade of white light manually or automatically. For example, in a dressing room, shoppers could view themselves in outfits under different lighting conditions reflective of where they intend to wear them. The retailer could tune the shade of white light based on time of day, exterior environment, fashion season and as product displays change. If the system is capable of producing saturated colors, a wide variety of aesthetic effects can be achieved to distinguish the retail environment and special events.

Some products leverage this capability in other ways to provide desirable features. For example, the LED lighting could be designed to dim to a very warm color appearance similarly to an incandescent lamp. Some products automatically adjust to maintain a constant color output over their service life, mitigating color inconsistencies and color shift that may occur during operation.

Color appearance of light sources is a powerful sales tool that is specified and built into the retail environment. New control options allow retailers to control color on an ongoing basis to maximize lighting’s role as the “silent salesperson.”

Craig DiLouie, LC, serves as education director for the Lighting Controls Association (lightingcontrolsassociation.org).