Behind the Lens

4.9Color Temperature

Our world is filled with color—deep reds, cool blues, vibrant yellows—all of which we see because the light from the sun contains all of the colors of the rainbow and the individual objects in our world reflect certain colors back to our eyes.

Human vision is incredibly flexible with regard to color. Our eyes and our brains work together to interpret many different lighting situations and see them as natural and normal.

The color of light is measured on the Kelvin scale, originated by British scientist Lord William Thomson Kelvin in 1848. Lord Kelvin theorized that if you take a perfect black body radiator—which is a theoretical material that neither reflects nor refracts light—and you slowly started to apply heat, the radiator ...