et cetera...: In this series, we discuss some of the most frequently asked questions we receive about LEDs. Today, Color Technology Specialist Wendy Luedtke runs through chromaticity diagrams and what they mean in the world of LED fixtures.
Chromaticity diagrams are helpful tools to objectively specify the colors coming from a light source.
2 comments:
LEDs are a really fascinating technology! I remember going in high school to visit the ETC Headquarters in Middleton, WI on a weekend with a few of my theatre friends. A new line of LED fixtures had just come out at the time, so our tour guide was going on about how the increased number of LEDs in the fixture would help it reach a broader color range. It had not occurred to me that a red, green, and blue LED was not enough to reach every point on a chromaticity diagram. As such, I asked why that was. It was explained to me in a similar fashion as the article: "if a luminaire has two colors, the chromaticities of each can be plotted and a line drawn between them. That luminaire can use those two colors to mix to any point along that line." By adding more color points, the fixture can not only reach more colors, but also achieve different spectral composition and power for some colors. Lighting is a fascinating field!
This is my first lecture about how colors are analyzed and categorized in scientific way. The article pointed out how the color palettes were designed in the first place. And dived into the chromaticity diagram more of a physics way to explain its optical features. From the reading I learned several facts about color in lightings that I think I know but can’t understand. For example, why the purple is a color that differs from one instrument from the other to produce, and the mixing curve usually didn’t work out as expected. It turned out that purple is not a color that caused by single frequency of the light, it is a mixture between two different wavelengths. The other interesting fact I learned is that color mixing in modern LED is achieved by creating axis on this chromaticity diagram, this explained why there is certain boundary of what color can be produced by LED and what not.
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