Hello,

I am putting together a small home studio which I plan to use to shoot for microstock amongst other things. It's a very small room (10ft x 6.5ft). I have two monolights and my experience so far using them in this room is that the room turns into an oven in no time. I have also recently discovered that replacement flashbulbs and light-modifiers are no longer available for these monolights.

As well as considering buying new monolights, I have also been considering the alternative of investing in a L.E.D continuous light setup. Aside from the advantage of LEDs running much cooler, I am also drawn to the advantage of seeing the effect of the light in real time as well as the option of using the lights for video. Obviously I would be using Daylight balanced lights with high CRI ratings.

My questions are these?

1) Are photographs lit with high CRI rated L.E.D lights still likely to fail quality control with the microstock agencies?

2) Are there any of you out there using L.E.D lights for studio-based microstock work? If so what is your experience?

FYI

http://theonlinephotographer.typepad.com/the_online_photographer/2012/04/led-lighting-for-photography-kirk-tuck.html


http://www.dpreview.com/forums/thread/3164333

light is light - as long as you have your white balance correct it doesn't matter what kind of light you use.

Not exactly. You'll never pull out colors in post from sodium street light shooting for example. That's because of low CRI, color rendering index.

I have cool leds photos in shutter.... Offset....getty...

Just to clarify - when you say "cool" are you referring to the colour temp of the lights? What lights are you using?

Quote from: PhotoBomb on June 27, 2016, 18:23

light is light - as long as you have your white balance correct it doesn't matter what kind of light you use.

Not exactly. You'll never pull out colors in post from sodium street light shooting for example. That's because of low CRI, color rendering index.

well said Irina, same for fluorescent those things that flicker. not forgeting color cast of the walls too.

bad things can happen with a picture with an offset quality of light and a camera induced WB.
In other  words  you loose wavelengths, meaning colour depth, when you  play too much with leds and camera wb.

True, LED lights generally don't project the full spectrum of light from ultraviolet to infrared like a tungsten bulb would, hence the CRI ratings. 98% CRI means that 2% of the light spectrum projected is inaccurate. This shouldn't be too much of a problem though because if the image looks good - then it is good plain and simple.
I use LED lighting for video with no problems, energy efficient and a lot cooler than tungsten\halogen\par etc...