The impact of illuminance and colour temperature on viewing fine art paintings under LED lighting

Abstract

The aims of this study were to investigate suitable LED lighting conditions for viewing fine art paintings in a museum environment and to test Kruithof's rule that defines pleasant lighting in terms of correlated colour temperature (CCT) and illuminance. The experiment was conducted in a room designed to simulate the exhibition of real paintings in museums. Twenty-four observers of different gender and educational background participated to evaluate oil and gouache paintings under different lighting conditions. Each painting was assessed via 14 word pairs using the categorical judgment method. The results showed that illuminance had a larger impact than CCT on visual perception, and three factors dominate visual perceptions: Comfort, Vividness and Definition. The present results only partially agreed with Kruithof's rule. A comfort zone of illuminance and CCT for paintings in museums has been developed.

The impact of LED lighting parameters on viewing fine art paintings

“…There were six male and six female observers. According to our earlier results, 12 observers having an art or engineering educational backgrounds showed no difference in their answers. Therefore, only engineering background observers were used here.…”

Light dominates colour preference when correlated colour temperature differs

“…Considering the consistency among each trial as well as the results of related works 23,25,28 , such statistics seems to be reasonable.…”

“…Before the formal experiment, a training phase was provided to the participant with the welcome light and the first object to be evaluated. As suggested by Zhai et al 25 , during the experiment the questions were read out by the experimenter and the participant also responded orally. Such a procedure was to avoid incomplete chromatic adaption when writing answers on white paper.…”

“…Colour preference has been reported to be impacted by several contextual factors which include the lighting application 19,21 , regional cultural difference [22][23][24] , illuminance level 25,26 and age difference 27 . Such research has contributed to the development of light quality evaluation but has also highlighted new problems.…”

“…The quantity and type of experimental objects varied considerably between different reported studies. Some researchers invited the participants to perceive a single type of object under different lights, such as fruit and vegetables 2,9 , skin tones 38 , artworks 25,33 , printed images 36 , cosmetic products 10 , or consumer goods 4,11 . Meanwhile, in other contributions, groups of mixed objects were used 3,28,34 .…”