LED panels dual color – How to choose?

[Kirk Darling]

I’ve been in still photography for 40 years, but brand new in video. That means I know color and light balance, but LED continuous lighting is new to me…but I remember well the days before electronic flash, too.

My experience so far with LED panels and high-intensity near-point LED lights shows that apparently the hole in the magenta portion of their LED spectrum is normal and only corrected with the very highest end units.

I say this is a “hole” in magenta rather than a spike in green. If it were merely a spike in green, it would be easily corrected by filtration–you can always remove excess. It’s hard to correct properly for a lack without suffering a shift in other colors–but we can live with that in most cases, especially if we intend to color grade the production anyway.

Another issue is that even without the magenta hole, an LED light doesn’t necessarily hit its advertised color temperature, and they may noticeably vary even within the same make and model. That means the key light might be a noticeably different color temperature from the fill. That’s a particularly nasty problem to deal with in post.

This is rather an old problem in a way, resurfacing. Back in the old tungsten light days of stills (which is still rather the norm in video), tungsten lights had a tendency to vary in color temperature as they aged. Filtration at the light source was the answer. That’s why I’d heavily lean toward variable temperature LED lights with the expectation of testing and indexing each light for the setting that matches my other lights.