Big Picture - June/July 2019 - 16

inside output

Shining a Light
on LEDs
LED lighting is on the rise for wide-format PSPs - and for good reason.
| by Craig Miller

et me shed some light on illumination for your

company. After all, we can't work in the dark. It
goes without saying: Our work becomes more
difficult if we conduct it under bad lighting.
Your monitors in your business and your TVs at
home most likely are lit with LED technology. Both of my
family's cars have LED headlights, and our house is now
almost completely converted to LED. Each of these examples has convinced me of the advantages of LED. Now let
me convince you.
The time has come to tackle my biggest conversion yet:
Pictographics. Our shop is 20,000 square feet with a
3000-square-foot print room, 11,000-square-foot warehouse
and finishing area, and 6000 square feet of offices. There are
362 non-LED lightbulbs in our building. Twenty-eight of the
fixtures in our warehouse and print room are considered
high-bay lights because they're suspended 16 feet from the
ceiling. They each use a 400-watt metal-halide bulb. The
remainder of our lights rely on various shapes and sizes of
fluorescent. Retrofitting all of these hundreds of lights will
take research, time, and money - but just how much?

BIG PICTURE

June/July 2019

SHADES OF WHITE
What are some of the variables we should consider when
lighting work spaces in our industry? We're a color business,
so the first consideration should be the color of the light. It's
important to understand "white" can mean a lot of different
things in terms of light, just like there are many Pantone colors
that fall under the definition of white.
Color in lighting is determined by color temperature based
on a scale of 1000 to 10,000 Kelvin. However, in commercial
CRAIG MILLER is a principal shareholder in Las Vegas-

based Pictographics (pictographics.net) where he is also director
of military and law-enforcement projects.

and residential lighting, the scale falls into the 2000 to 6500
range, or 2000K to 6500K. Fun fact: This temperature
calculation came from what color metal glows when it's
heated. Another fun fact: The surface temperature of the sun
is about 5780 Kelvin. (Hint: Remember that number.)
At the lower end, from 2000K to 3000K, the light emitted
is referred to as "warm white" and ranges in color from an
orangish white to a yellowish white glow. Colors between
3100K and 4500K are called "cool white" or "bright white."
Lightbulbs within this range will emit a more neutral white
light and may even have a slightly blue tint at the higher end.
Light that's 4500K and above falls into the "daylight" color
temperature. This range emits a blue-white light that is similar
to walking out into the bright sunlight at midday - good selfie
lighting, I hear.
Some of you have light booths in your shops as part of your
color-matching process. These booths are equipped with
standardized lighting to eliminate the variability in ambient
lighting. What's the color temperature of the lights in these?
Booths are typically designated as D50 and D65. D50 is used as
a white point in the RGB color gamut and D65 is used as the
white point in CMYK; D50 lighting is 5000K and D65 is 6500K.

http://www.pictographics.net

Big Picture - June/July 2019

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