[jeffkrol]

Been playing with the techy end of lighting including building my own boards for diodes.
Decided to throw CRI out the window for a minute and join the errr RGB crowd.. sort of.


The pucks lighting this tank have zero whites and 5 color channels.
Now it's a composite of 2 patterns w/ a cyan heavy pucks on the sides and a deep red heavy puck in the middle.


Yea kind of weird but atm all that I built.
It's sort of easy to see the differences.


Color is out of my personal comfort zone but think it looks like something one would make w/ t5's..


Oddly, for some reason the fish are more active under this than the normal lighting. Could just be hungry and I did wake them.


Color banding is more intense than it normally will be when mounted at the right height. Now they are just sitting on the glass top..






Anyways feelings?

Oh and w/ the 5 colors they can be adjusted to a more normal white..

 

[billb]

Hi Jeff,

Let me qualify my comments up front - I am not good at describing what I like about lighting schemes! Easier for me to pick between two pictures of the same tank with different lights.

The picture looks nice. Good greens. Pinks and some red showing through. Maybe you can show the tank using a more standard freshwater lighting scheme as a comparison?

On my own tanks I have a combo of t5 and LED. The t5s were selected to be longer wavelengths and the leds are actually marine spectra so they show lots of blue. The light comes across as a little cool but I still get good color in my AR mini and rotala H'ra. I have seen very attractive t5 bulb combos and I really like the saturated colors seen in good RGB lights like the ADA Solar units. In fact, I think I would pick the ADA Solars as my favorite.

Hope this rambling comment provides something useful!

 

[Deanna]

The first image reminds me of the Beamswork FSPEC, which I like. I've transitioned to a Twinstar SA, which I like better for somewhat increased reds and overall color density. However, I now have them sitting side-by-side and the combination is very appealing as well, better than the FSPEC alone. In your two white light photos, in the sequence of photos, they still look more like the FSPEC, but the one on the left is drifting more to my preference for a little heavier red (not quite Twinstar, though). In the large first photo, that deep red puck does seem to approach a better look (to my taste) in the middle. Perhaps increasing the number of red pucks would warm it up more.

Of course, photos can make it hard to visualize the depth of color. I've wondered if a pure white 'control' were placed in the corner of our photos, e.g.; a 2" white square, for white balancing aspects, would help standardize views for comparative purposes.

 

[jeffkrol]

The first image reminds me of the Beamswork FSPEC, which I like. I've transitioned to a Twinstar SA, which I like better for somewhat increased reds and overall color density. However, I now have them sitting side-by-side and the combination is very appealing as well, better than the FSPEC alone. In your two white light photos, in the sequence of photos, they still look more like the FSPEC, but the one on the left is drifting more to my preference for a little heavier red (not quite Twinstar, though). In the large first photo, that deep red puck does seem to approach a better look (to my taste) in the middle. Perhaps increasing the number of red pucks would warm it up more.

Of course, photos can make it hard to visualize the depth of color. I've wondered if a pure white 'control' were placed in the corner of our photos, e.g.; a 2" white square, for white balancing aspects, would help standardize views for comparative purposes.

OK I'm forced to rewrite my answer which was long and picture heavy and VERY frustrated why my computer erases for no apparent reason my post..
This site UNLIKE many doesn't save drafts here (it will on a phone though but limited abilities). Anyways enough of that..


Data:
11881K cyan pattern
5323K red pattern
(from lumiled tools)

The 2 variations vs different "action spectrums Intensity is not calibrated. Nm may not be "exact" but bloody close to expected.
MANUF plot of the white line one above. For reference.
Some reason "my" spectrophotometer seems to be under -reporting yellow/green.
Not sure exactly why atm. Manuf says its "OK"..
Inexpensive unit though not cheap.

MANUF data of the 3 red

Of note is the horrible "red" (R9) number..Odd isn't it.
Just doesn't match the patch yet.. really red.

USE grey of the wand as a "white card"

There is plenty of red but unf. only place in this photo I can prove that is the bronzing.

Seneye record of the cyan one (over a test tank so don't freak out about the temp)

Baseline red puck.

Just use the grey as a tone indicator.

Again actuality the difference between the 2 is strictly a cyan/deep red ratio.
Guess my question is which would one prefer to start with before tweaking.


Personally my feelings lie in-between the 2 and easily accomplished by breaking my cardinal rule of 1 channel 1 color.
And I've pretty well fixated on only 5 channels.


It's a challenge and time/money consuming..

 

[Deanna]

Yup: although many of my posts are based upon templates I’ve created for common responses, anything new I always write in Word for copy and paste into the forum for that very reason you mentioned.

I’ve always had trouble interpreting grays, which is why I prefer white “white cards”, although those grays do seem to be on the blue side in the first photo. OK: I’m ignoring that temperature, but do you get those PUR values with a better (IMO) temp?

Directly answering your question, based upon personal taste: my choice is the last photo. I even might move outside the second photo, away from the first photo. I think you are looking at moving between them. Also, in that last one, the gray (and the white) in the wand looks more natural to me. I do hope you get more than these two opinions, though.

 

[jeffkrol]

Water temp and pur aren't related for the most part.

Pur runs 63-68% according to seneye.

Sometimes I just need to post for my own sake...

 

[Deanna]

Water temp and pur aren't related for the most part.

No, I was referring to color temp on the Seneye graph. It's way over in the blue area.

 

[Blue Ridge Reef]

Think she means Kelvin. Anyway, I saw this thread when it was posted, but was on my phone and didn't dare venture a guess. Then when on desktop I didn't trust my own eyes and thought I'd wait for others to opine. But if I had to say, the final photo or the one before it looks best to me, but I understand everything from the camera's internal adjustments to the angle of my monitor can change things from how my eye might see it were I standing in front of it. The big first photo looks like where I end the day on my two adjustable tanks, lots of reds, stronger blues, and fading white light more. Seeing this exact light over my personal tanks might garner a totally different response though, hard to say.

 

[jeffkrol]

No, I was referring to color temp on the Seneye graph. It's way over in the blue area.

Actually it's way over in the blue/green, sort of like 11 meter ocean depth.
Or a deep lake..
Plan was to run cyan slightly dimmed or driven at a different current.



This is it w/ the cyan channel off.. Red one will of course be identical w/ th deep red channel off.
no green, no white of course.

Oddly when put into the lumiled calculator the K temp on the below is approx 11000K
Depends on the "bin" of the royal blue though.
still certainly doesn't look >10000K
Cyan doesn't shift the K temp much. Main "control" would be the Royal Blue.

black line is the SUM..

Psychologically it has been found that people prefer low k light that fall below the locus (black curve)
and high k lights that fall above the locus.

In other words orange-warm
or cyan-hot..

This is a bit contrary to here that seem to favor higher k lights in the magenta range (below the locus)
Like a grolux tube.

https://www.lrc.rpi.edu/programs/solidstate/colorResearch.asp

To better understand white light source color appearance, the LRC conducted a series of experiments to measure perceptions of white illumination from light sources of different CCTs. These studies showed that perceptions of minimally tinted white illumination for sources with CCTs above 4000 K are associated with chromaticities that fall above the blackbody locus. In contrast, perceptions of minimally tinted white illumination for sources with CCTs below 4000 K are associated with chromaticities that lie well below the blackbody locus.

Research in these areas has shown that when given a visual choice, people often prefer “white” or minimally tinted sources that provide good color rendering.

Use the Seneye Kelvin chart for reference.

 

[jeffkrol]

Think she means Kelvin. Anyway, I saw this thread when it was posted, but was on my phone and didn't dare venture a guess. Then when on desktop I didn't trust my own eyes and thought I'd wait for others to opine. But if I had to say, the final photo or the one before it looks best to me, but I understand everything from the camera's internal adjustments to the angle of my monitor can change things from how my eye might see it were I standing in front of it. The big first photo looks like where I end the day on my two adjustable tanks, lots of reds, stronger blues, and fading white light more. Seeing this exact light over my personal tanks might garner a totally different response though, hard to say.

Normally I'd not use my phone camera for this stuff but it's turned out to be "fairly" accurate though I do need to correct the saturation down a bit.
Point is if your monitor is nearly color balanced it should look like it does in the tank.
At least we don't need to deal with reflected vs transmitted light..

 

[ahem]

On DIY lighting I always thought it would be cool to implement some kind of left to right effect that moves over the length of the light bar to simulate sunrise, sunset, and the moon moving across the sky.

 

[jeffkrol]

On DIY lighting I always thought it would be cool to implement some kind of left to right effect that moves over the length of the light bar to simulate sunrise, sunset, and the moon moving across the sky.

Yea did that on my 55 w/ 5 "pucks" but it went center warm then gradually full across the board.
With the above puck design it is easy, though expensive and really bulky in this form, to design.


There was a German reef light that designed a fully zoned panel using many many small emitters.. Think it started at like $2-3000