Photography question - LED lighting

No, use the white in the photo itself, or your white will be hit & miss, albeit a lot better than no white balancing.

Set the cam to show any saturated areas on the screen.

NT

I would question the veracity of the website!

I use both methods extensively and photography is a faff and only really worth doing if the source material is in an album and there is no easy way to get them onto a flatbed scanner. If I can I always scan original material 600dpi as many as will fit onto the scanner at once.

The problems for photography of old photographs is that they are seldom flat and controlling reflections and scattered light is hard.

I prefer the reproducibility of scanning if at all possible. Photography is possible but you will work hard to get it right.

Shouldn't make much difference. Neither will be a true match for colour temperature but if the photographs are monochrome it won't matter and if they are colour then autowhite balance should take care of it.

But seriously consider scanning them on a flatbed - you will get better results unless you are extremely good at still life photography.

Of course. Relatively simple filters. Which are possible with a relatively smooth continuous spectrum light source. But things like LEDs with huge spikes and troughs in the response are near impossible to correct.

Sure, it's swings & roundabouts. I'd sooner go with imperfect but good cfls than filament. I say that from dealing with the resulting issues in both cases.

NT

I'd have thought tubes, rather than CFL, would be a better choice for a light box? And probably a bigger variety too?

Along with a thick colour correction filter pack and you needed to stabilise the mains if you wanted to get decent reproducible results.

Enlarger lamps like photofloods ran a bit hotter for a shorter life and have the rating on the side of the base rather than end of the bulb for obvious reasons. The printing exposure time was long anyway.

Home wet chemistry colour printing was quite hit and miss.

Better enlargers used low voltage lamps. And you would likely be correcting the colour balance anyway when printing.

But very good fun.

I wasn't aware the OP was building a light box. If so, tubes are more diffu se, but the wider range makes more potential to get it wrong. You can alway s use a monitor as a light box :). Just add a sheet of diffuser to lose the pixels. Monitors are lit by either CCFL or LED.

Really though the imperfect CRI is a bit of a red herring in this case. If you're photographing objects then yes, it counts. But when you're rephotogr aping photos you're at best just recording the 3 colour channels in the ori ginal print, making CRI not a significant issue, as long as you've got plen ty of all 3 colours to avoid noise. So what matters is to get a cool enough light source, ie preferably not filament.

NT

Another idea