Colour temperature

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Glossary Terms

Colour Temperature is a way of describing a colour-quality of light. It is a measure of how much light of different colours is present. High colour temperatures have a lot of blue light and low temperatures have more red light. Unfortunately, in common language, light with a lot of red has become known as warm lighting - the colour of fire, whereas blueish lighting is described as cold - the colour of icy water. This is the reverse of colour temperature; the longer, less energetic - and so "cooler" - wavelengths of visible light are at the red end of the spectrum, whereas shorter, higher temperature wavelengths are at the blue end.

In film photography, not matching the colour temperature of the film & process to the lighting of the subject can result in pictures looking, for example, overly red or yellow (daylight film used under indoor lighting), or too blue (indoor film used outside). Similar problems result in digital cameras when the white balance and other colour balance settings are preset for the "wrong" type of lighting - although most digital cameras avoid this problem by having some automatic adjustment of colour.

Typical values for colour temperature are approximately

Blue sky	up to 18000K
Sun plus light from a blue sky	6500K
Electronic flash or blue flashbulbs	6000K
"Daylight" fluorescent lamps	4500K
Clear flashbulbs	3800K
"warm" fluorescent lighting (including some low-energy bulbs)	3000K
Tungsten filament domestic lighting	2800K
Candle	1950K

It is well-known that heating a metal object will cause it to glow, first red, then orange, through to bright bluish-white. Technically, the colour temperature is that temperature, measured on the absolute scale in degrees Kelvin, to which a black object would have to be heated to produce light of similar colour - or Spectral Power Density (or Spectral Power Distribution) - SPD.