How Do We Use Color in Lighting? Part 1
If you open your eyes, and you’re like most people, you see color.
I know this is simplifying it a good bit, but let’s think about just color for a minute.
If you’re not colorblind, you are constantly seeing and observing color. Color is a fascinating attribute that we can use in stage lighting to help show the emotion being set forth by the presenter we are lighting. In fact, I believe that color is the very most impactful attribute of lighting that we have to work with.
Let’s dive into lighting color theory – we’ll learn how we can use it, and then how to break free from the “rules”!
Color Theory 101 for Stage Lighting
Have you ever noticed how opposing colors selectively absorb other colors?
For example, when you point a blue light at a red surface, it makes the surface look black! Why doesn’t the surface look blue? Or perhaps you’ve noticed a restaurant or trade show that lights the focal points such as tables or products in white, while most of the ambient light is colored?
When you step into the church world, you see color used in many different ways. Pretty much every church has colored walls or carpets. Some churches use color sparingly or not at all in their lighting scheme. Others use mostly colored light with little white light. Some transform a room with color as well as lighting the stage. If you haven’t used much color before in your lighting setup, here’s a quick guide to using color in your stage lighting.
“The Rules” – Lighting Color Theory Debunked and Demystified!
How to Get Color out of Your Lights
Stage lights have grown and evolved over the years, and today we have 3 main ways to color a light source.
Additive Color Theory – RGB Lighting
The first method of coloring light is the additive theory and method which presents itself
primarily in RGB LED lighting. LED’s can also include an amber and/or white LED along side of the RGB to give you some more options and flexibility.
Additive colors work by fading up and down the colored LED’s or lights in order to mix the desired color.
The additive color theory also works with conventional lights that are gelled, and you can mix colors when pointing 2 lights at the same object from about the same position.
As a result, additive color mixing is the best way to get really deep colors, as the next method, subtractive color mixing, loses a lot of output when mixing deep colors.
Subtractive Color Theory – CMY Lighting
Many moving lights and conventional color mixing engines feature a white lamp which emits light through a set of 3 color wheels- Cyan, Magenta and Yellow.
Using the colors in CMY mixing when subtracting from white light gets better results than using Red, Green and Blue to subtract, and allows you to mix better deep colors.
Colored Gel
The other, although dying, mode of subtractive color mixing is colored gel. The gel sits in front of a light source and filters out the color from the light, thus subtracting wavelengths of light from the source.
Matching RGB and CMY
You can match many colors with RGB and CMY sources, but the funky-ness comes when you note the efficiency of such mixing.
For example, let’s mix a deep red. With RGB, you just bring up the red color, and it’s a great, bright, rich red. With CMY, you subtract Magenta and Yellow at full, and you’ll get a deep red- but by that point, it won’t be very bright because you have subtracted so much light to get there!
For this reason, most CMY moving lights have a separate color wheel with colors such as red, congo blue, light pink, orange, CTO, purple, and whatever other colors that particular manufacturer decided was hard to mix on their fixture.
Still, as a designer, there will still be times where you look at the deep color mixable on your CMY source, sigh, and move on to just mix a color that complements what you are doing with your RGB lights. That’s just life, sometimes!
However, with the way that technology is progressing, LED’s are becoming more advanced and producing better colors than ever before, so this may not be such a problem in the future!
