Practical advice on commercial lighting from LED retrofits to lighting design.

If you're responsible for determining the right ambiance and light quality of your application, then you probably already know how important understanding Color Rendering Index (CRI) and Correlated Color Temperature (CCT) is.

Here's the problem: CRI and CCT are anything but easy to understand.

Color Rendering Index is calculated based on how well a light source renders eight specific pastel colors. The theory is if it light renders these colors well, it should render all colors well. CRI is a simple and helpful lighting spec to predict how good the visual output of a lighting product will be.

Correlated Color Temperature (CCT or just color temperature) gauges how yellow or blue light appears. It’s measured in Kelvin and usually falls in a range between 2200 and 6500 Kelvin degrees. Warm light sources have low color temperatures (2200-3000K), featuring red, orange, and yellow colors. Cool light sources have high color temperatures (>4000K) and feature blue light.

I’m not an average coffee drinker. I’m the obnoxiously picky kind of coffee drinker –– the guy who brings his own equipment to the office and refuses gas station and Starbucks coffee alike. This is not a point of pride for me anymore, really. It’s more of an Achilles’ heel, or a symptom of gross pretentiousness. (Sorry, co-workers. I’m a rotten, always-caffeinated monster.)

As the world clambers to make sense of the recent emergence of LED lighting, a handful of takeaway points have cropped up as the defining traits of the technology.

And alone atop that list of traits is this one: energy efficiency.

If you were to play a game of word association with a handful of your colleagues right now, asking them for the first idea that comes to mind when you say “LED lighting,” odds are they will spout out something about energy efficiency.

Why wouldn’t they? Energy efficiency is certainly the defining characteristic of LED.

Our lighting designers are frequently asked about color temperature and CRI. How important are these measurements to your lighting product decisions? 

With the emergence of LED lighting, the options have become almost limitless, so selecting the perfect color for your application can turn into an overwhelming endeavor.

We are wrapping up our series on selecting color temperature and color rendering index for your lighting. In this article, I’d like to give a little insight into how we think as lighting designers and what that means for you.

There’s no doubt that advancements in LED lighting over the past few years are staggering, as is the number of product options that have made their way to market. In fact, the very thing that makes LEDs so exciting to a lighting designer are also what makes things so difficult for us each time we specify a new product –– so many options.

We’re continuing our series on how to pick the right color temperature and color rendering index (CRI) for various applications. If you missed it, you may want to read our post on color temperature: A guide to choosing color temperature for your lighting. In this article, I’m going to unpack the challenges around CRI and provide some practical tips for making the right choice.

This is the second post in our series on choosing the right color characteristics for your lighting project. Last time we addressed color temperature, but maybe the most critical issue — which has surfaced with the popularity of LED lighting — is color consistency. How do you know that the color of your lighting will be consistent from one product to another? Let’s dive in.