Brian:
I've gotten completely lost following the lumens, watts, 5's, 8's, rows, and... man, my head is starting to hurt. But... I just changed the lighting in my garage/body shop/woodshop from incandescent to florescent. I originally had 3 100W bulbs in each of the three bays. The garage is 3 bays (36x26) but only two bays are real car bays. The third is where I keep all of my tools since it always seems to be too cluttered to actually use any of them in that bay.
I bought the basic 0 degree 4 foot, double tube fixtures from Lowes - $20 each. I used standard 40W, soft white tubes in the fixtures . I put 6 fixtures in the two car bays. They run in two rows, from the garage doors to the back wall, just inside of where the door tracks run. That puts them roughly 8 feet (or a bit more) apart. End to end, each fixture is 32" from its neighbor. I had to start about 52" from the front wall of the garage due to clearance of the door as it opens/closes. I didn't care exactly what distance the last light ended up being from the back wall. My ceiling is 9'
2" high.What I can tell you is that each bay is lit up like glory itself. It took a little getting used to - the light is so different in color from the yellow of incandescent. But in a short time it became quite natural seeming. The best part - no shadows. I mean - no shadows. I don't care what you do, you can't produce a shadow that obstructs your view. It was shocking to really see everything that was cluttered on top of my table saw - and I'm not kidding.
I priced 8 foot fixtures and bulbs but all I could find locally - without a lot of shopping around, was HO fixtures and the bulbs will take you to the poor house. Not worth it in my opinion.
I wondered about color correction since I paint a lot of cars, but to be honest, I'm not going to sweat it anymore. The light and the color are so much better than what I was used to that I'll just stick with what I have.
My neighbors have made laughing comments about the light coming from my garage now. I mean - it's a lot of light. My eyes are going the wrong way fast and I just can't see like I used to in low light conditions anymore. Not a problem anymore.
So - I don't know what the lumens are, don't care. Don't care what the watts are. Don't care about 5's, 8's or 12's. I got light now and it was quite reasonable the way I did it (price wise).
Hope this sheds some light on the discussion.