Learning more about lighting color: understanding CRI
Choosing the right lighting can be a difficult endeavor, as you not only have to consider energy usage and style but also how the color of the light source will illuminate your space.
However, lighting color is not absolute but rather based on a complicated set of factors such as how much energy the bulb emits, which affects what color you ultimately perceive. Still, one way to benchmark lighting color is to use the color rendering index (CRI), which quantifies the ability of a light to reveal colors accurately in comparison to an ideal light source. CRI involves a scale from 0 to 100 percent, with 100 being the same as daylight.
Thus, you often want to find a light source with a CRI of 90 or higher, which is considered excellent and will reflect the objects in your space close to how they would appear in natural light. While in certain instances you may not want natural light, it’s often beneficial to keep colors as relatively true as possible.
For example, a grocery store might think it’s a good idea to use an LED light source that has a lower CRI but which spikes the amount of red emitted so that their meat look better than it actually does. However, once the customer gets home and looks at the meat under their own light source, the meat may not look as good and they may think it’s starting to spoil or something else is off with the quality of the product. That’s why we often recommend aiming for a high CRI, barring special circumstances.
By understanding CRI, you can find lighting that better illuminates the colors in your space, which can ultimately help you please clients.
