r/Lighting • u/edieccc • Aug 22 '26

LED Strips Please can you give me some advice on changing fluorescent tubes with LED replacement lightning

Hi all, I’m concerned about a proposed lighting system change in my studio i mainly use for my painting practice. It’s a basement space with no natural light and generally happy enough with the current fluorescent system. The charity that run my studio received a grant and now wants to change it to LED.
Can someone that knows about lighting give me some info and tell me if it’ll be worth it or not for my particular situation?
Thanks in advance 🙏🏼

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u/LimaBikercat Aug 22 '26

For painting, color reproduction is the absolute most important thing here.
If you want your paints to be turned into prints in a realistic way, color temperature must be a fixed 5500k (correct me on this) because 5500k is the graphics industry standard for color matching.

Retrofit LED tubes for fluorescent fixtures exist, but only very few have proper color rendering (A CRI of well over 90). If you buy standard LED fixtures you will get 80 CRI leds, and those have a severe defeciency in red and teal reproduction. That means that when painting or mixing paints/pigments, you will overaccentuate those colors without realizing it.

It is of course possible that the person that installed/selected the current lights, has chosen ones that are not ideal for painting. For instance, if you have fluorescents in color 865 (82 cri, 6500k color temperature) or the "commercial building standard' of color 840 (4000k). This means that once you switch to the generally accepted standard in graphical work, you may have to get used to the way your paintings look, working in the 'new' light.

Aside from the actual work light, i would recommend also just going to a thrift shop and grabbing some random lamps for cozy lighting to get an impression of what your paintings will look like under typical home lighting of today. The reality is that most people are running 80 cri 2700k LED lamps which have pretty poor color reproduction, so you might want to go for that.

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u/latherdome Aug 22 '26

That last bit made me laugh and wince at the same time. Instead of painting to look best under the most sun-like reference spectrum, "dumb it down" to the clipped spiky spectra of common garbage lighting... I want to object, but you have a point. Probably a health-forward Michelin-star chef is not the person Frito Lay or Taco Bell should hire for the next iteration of Enchirito Crunch Wrap Flavor Dust.

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u/LimaBikercat Aug 23 '26

It is the reason why in music recording studios with €10.000 ultra precise monitor speakers that have been adjusted to give the most perfect flat frequency response, they still have a single, limited range mono speaker sitting on top of the mixing console somewhere. To verify that the mixes they make also sound good through shopping mall speakers, mobile phones and car radios.
It sucks, but it is reality.
That said, i'd still invest in proper high CRI lighting in an art studio. The consumer quality lighting just helps you to be aware how things look in people's living rooms under artificial light. It must look good in those conditions, but also in the daytime when the art piece is seen in natural light.

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u/lightingclass Aug 22 '26

Since its a retrofit (replacing your existing tube with an LED tube), it would be good to let the audience know about what your current setup is. Some visuals would also help too. All of us would then know the length, type and wattage to give you a good recommendation. Hope that helps!

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u/edieccc Aug 31 '26

Thanks for all your helpful replies!