Blue is the Warmest Color: the film for lesbians, color scientists familiar with Planck's curve, and especially lesbian color scientists. :-)
Blade Runner just starting on BBC America. A true masterpiece of film making.
P.S. There is no green hot. Otherwise the temperature trajectory through the chromaticity diagram would pass through greens, but it doesn’t.
Even though a pure tungsten filament doesn't emit a black body spectrum directly from its surface, incandescent bulb filaments were designed to more closely approach the black body emission curve by being made as a "coiled coil," a very fine wire, wound into a very fine coil, with this fine coil itself coiled into a larger coil. In this way, each "surface element" of the filament was caused to "see" many other surface elements of itself; the bouncing back and forth of the average photon between these different surfaces caused some absorption and re-emission.
It is this equilibrium between absorbed and re-emitted photons that gives the beautiful black-body characteristic, similar to that generated by the hot carbon particles in a candle flame or wood fire.
Sunlight also is a fairly good approximation of a black body, albeit at something like 6500° K. I very much dislike LED and CF lamps. These (in effect) give "pixel color," meaning that they try to approximate natural light by combining light various fairly narrow wavelength bands. LEDs are worse than CF lamps because LEDs generate very narrow "spectral lines."
Thus, we are seeing a transition to what might be called "digital light" to go with the recent transition to "digital images" and "digital audio."
Here, the word "recent" means "over the past 30 years or so."
I believe that the human eye is not well adapted to "digital light." That's why sunlight - and light from incandescent light bulbs - is so pleasant.
In my basement, I have enough old fashioned 60W bulbs to last the rest of my life.
Interesting. Thanks.
Blue is the Warmest Color: the film for lesbians, color scientists familiar with Planck's curve, and especially lesbian color scientists. :-)
ping for am coffee reading
I’m a photographer, it seems like half my life is spent tweaking color temperatures/white balances. . . although, objectively it can’t be that much because then I wouldn’t have enough time for all the dust spot removal I do.
Most people seem to be under the mistaken impression that I get to all my time playing around behind a camera, my how I wish that were true.
It will be interesting to me to see how a discussion of color temperatures and white balance on a political forum unfolds.