Significant effort has been made in the exploration of novel lanthanide‐activated phosphors with multicolor emission over the last decade, especially highly efficient and emission tunable phosphor systems, to optimize the performance of white light‐emitting diodes with regard to their positive impact on energy efficiency, their correlated color temperature, and their color rendering index. Therefore, a research focus in recent years has been the modification and tailoring of the photoluminescence of phosphors, enabling the acquisition of new phosphors with tunable emission colors. This review aims to highlight the prevailing strategies used for tuning the photoluminescence of lanthanide‐activated phosphors. Remarkable examples of newly designed emission‐tunable phosphor materials based on these prevailing strategies are introduced in this review. A comprehensive understanding of these strategies can provide an extensive guide for the discovery and fabrication of highly efficient phosphors with tunable emission colors in the future.

A series of novel Ce, Tb and Eu ion doped YSiAlON-based oxynitride phosphors were synthesized by the solid-state method and characterized by X-ray powder diffraction, scanning electron microscopy, photoluminescence, lifetimes and thermo-luminescence. The excitation of the Ce/Tb co-doped and Ce/Tb/Eu tri-doped phosphor with near-UV radiation results in strong linear Tb green and Eu red emission. The occurrence of Ce-Tb and Ce-Tb-Eu energy transfer processes is responsible for the bright green or red luminescence. The Tb ion acting as an energy transfer bridge can alleviate MMCT quenching between the Ce-Eu ion pairs. The lifetime measurements demonstrated that the energy-transfer mechanisms of Ce→ Tb and Tb→ Eu are dipole-quadrupole and quadrupole-quadrupole interactions, respectively. The temperature dependent luminescence measurements showed that as-prepared green/red phosphors have good thermal stability against temperature quenching. The obtained results indicate that these phosphors might serve as promising candidates for n-UV LEDs.