How CRI is important in lighting up spaces or subjects?
In this post, will get to know what is Colour Rendering Index (or in short CRI) and why it is important to you in lighting up any spaces or subjects.
CRI is an indicator and the ability of a light source to reveal the colour of an object. It ranges from 0-100. An ideal light source, which is the direct sunlight, is CRI100. The sunlight contains a full spectrum of visible light and thus allows us to see objects with their original colour.
What would you see if you have a non-ideal or a low CRI light source?
For example, when we shine a red LED light source (which is having a low CRI) to a green leaf, It reflects very little red! Due to this, the leaves do not appear green!
Another example is the sodium street lamp. It has a low CRI value of 20-30. While it is considered energy efficient compared to other traditional lamps, it is often difficult to identify colour of a car correctly at night.
We experience such situations daily and it reflects on how we visually view things.
This is the core concept of CRI. It can be thought of as the color quality of a light source, and measured as deviation to a reference white light. The higher the CRI value, the closer it is to sunlight, which is a best quality light. With the best quality of light, we see things the way it should be.
Why is it beneficial to have an environment with a high Colour Rendering Index?
Well, it depends on your specific application. If the colour information of the object you want to illuminate is important, then CRI may be a point to note on. For example, in retail or in residential environment, we would like to see beautiful and accurate colours everyday, everytime.
Professional filmmakers usually use high CRI light in their shooting to produce the best possible colour representation in their films.
In the retail industry, it is important to have a great product display that turns heads. It will attract potential customers to view and interact with the product. To achieve this, one of the secret techniques is to have a high CRI lighting that makes the product appear more vibrant or vivid in color.
In product presentation, high CRI light will also create an environment ambiance that is visually crisp and sharp that encourages customers to stay longer.
And if this applies to a residential setting, the furniture and finishes project true colour and this would be very visually pleasing.
Hence, as CRI plays one of human centric lighting components, it provides visual comfort, which in turn creates a positive health and well being of humans.