What light frequency makes fish look best

[sesbalders]

hey all

I’m still playing with my AI settings to get it where I want it.

After coming back from the lfs with a couple of new additions I thought I’d have a play about.

I’ve knocked down the white and red wavelengths to get to more where the tanks are at the lfs, the fish don’t look anywhere near as striking now.

Just wondered if anyone had worked out which wavelength is the one that makes the fish look best.

Cheers

 

[DaJMasta]

It depends on the fish, but around 425 THz (red) is going to need to be in the spectrum if you want to see red in a fish, for example. Fish and some corals generally don't fluoresce (there are exceptions, but this is the usual), so if you want to see their color represented, that color needs to be present in your light, and moving towards more overall white light (closer to the natural color of their environment and closer to normal photography lighting conditions) will represent the full palette of colors in your fish, especially in photography. Remember, light you see is reflected by the subject unless it's fluorescing or it's generating the light, so any color you want to see needs to be in the lighting for it to be reflected in reasonable quantity.

Usually fixtures will have a lot of output power in the blue and UV, so more commonly, you'll want to boost red and white to get more even/white looking color. Green can be useful, but our eyes are most sensitive to it so what's in the white LEDs accounts for most of what you need, but everyone's got their taste and different fixtures have different baselines. If you have a spectrum graph for your light, you can look up natural lighting conditions (it varies with time of day, but noon is something like 5500K) and compare the look to try and move in that direction.

 

[sesbalders]

It depends on the fish, but around 425 THz (red) is going to need to be in the spectrum if you want to see red in a fish, for example. Fish and some corals generally don't fluoresce (there are exceptions, but this is the usual), so if you want to see their color represented, that color needs to be present in your light, and moving towards more overall white light (closer to the natural color of their environment and closer to normal photography lighting conditions) will represent the full palette of colors in your fish, especially in photography. Remember, light you see is reflected by the subject unless it's fluorescing or it's generating the light, so any color you want to see needs to be in the lighting for it to be reflected in reasonable quantity.

Usually fixtures will have a lot of output power in the blue and UV, so more commonly, you'll want to boost red and white to get more even/white looking color. Green can be useful, but our eyes are most sensitive to it so what's in the white LEDs accounts for most of what you need, but everyone's got their taste and different fixtures have different baselines. If you have a spectrum graph for your light, you can look up natural lighting conditions (it varies with time of day, but noon is something like 5500K) and compare the look to try and move in that direction.

Thanks for that, makes perfect sense.

 

[Daniel@R2R Verified Admin]

It depends on the fish, but around 425 THz (red) is going to need to be in the spectrum if you want to see red in a fish, for example. Fish and some corals generally don't fluoresce (there are exceptions, but this is the usual), so if you want to see their color represented, that color needs to be present in your light, and moving towards more overall white light (closer to the natural color of their environment and closer to normal photography lighting conditions) will represent the full palette of colors in your fish, especially in photography. Remember, light you see is reflected by the subject unless it's fluorescing or it's generating the light, so any color you want to see needs to be in the lighting for it to be reflected in reasonable quantity.

Usually fixtures will have a lot of output power in the blue and UV, so more commonly, you'll want to boost red and white to get more even/white looking color. Green can be useful, but our eyes are most sensitive to it so what's in the white LEDs accounts for most of what you need, but everyone's got their taste and different fixtures have different baselines. If you have a spectrum graph for your light, you can look up natural lighting conditions (it varies with time of day, but noon is something like 5500K) and compare the look to try and move in that direction.

Good and helpful answer!