I want to go on a guerrilla campaign around my neighborhood and replace porch light bulbs with warm equivalents.

I cannot overstate how much of a difference it made switching them all to 3000k warm whites. Of course instead of being replaceable bulbs they were all SMDs directly soldered onto little PCBs making it a bit of a project … but so worth it!

Desoldering/soldering was a pain as they were tiny; like 2mmx2mm. One cool thing I learned though is that you can use a multimeter in its ‘continuity’ setting to provide enough current to light up these small LEDs which is very convenient when testing if you soldered them correctly.

https://www.zgsm-china.com/blog/something-you-should-know-ab...

https://www.reddit.com/r/Tiguan/comments/1hq2hae/changed_ove...

I modded most LEDs in my house because 2700-3000K is too warm for me, but 4000K is too cool. So I mix them ;)

Do you by chance have any resources (videos or tutorials) to recommend that show how this is best done?

Not only the color temperature is so cold, but usually the spectrum is terrible, and the quality of the light is awful.

I just have to finish choosing the led driver :P

Lucky friends! Maybe repair shops could offer customized interior lighting as an aftermarket service.

Truth is, aftermarket lights for cars (typical AliExpress or Amazon stuff) always focus on brightness, but never on quality. It's usual for taxi drivers to have aftermarket lights in the vehicle, so you can find your money or credit card more easily, but the light quality is always terrible. :P

I found a German company that sent me a free sample of their amber film. As I recall their market was semiconductor manufacturing, but I can’t find them again. Amazon has a variety of films that should work.

A sheet of Rosco 3408 takes you from about 5500K to 3800K so a much warmer colour. A small sheet which should be enough goes for about £7 https://shopwl.com/rosco-roscolux-3408-roscosun-1-2-cto/ you can probably find it cheaper just by searching Rosco 3408

LED bulbs exacerbate an already existing problem caused by vehicle noses being too tall such that the headlight is exactly eye-height for other drivers. Sometimes they're poorly calibrated too, aiming too high. Many drivers also retrofit super bright LED lights on older cars that do a very bad job at properly focusing the beam on the ground (same thing was happening with drivers modding their old mirror reflector headlights with xenon lamps and giving everyone on the road an artists impression of a supernova up-close).

I've seen cars with lights that were obviously very bright but very well calibrated to point as much as possible to the road instead of my eyes. Those are maybe marginally more tiring than the warmer and much dimmer lights used in the past, but this is more than compensated in safety so probably a worthwhile trade. Proper calibration and sensible placing make all the difference.

So by this measure, not having to squint to see anything ahead, my (aging) eyes feel much more rested and reassured today than decades ago.

Are there new cars with warm LED lights?

I think it's a pretty good balance between visibility and comfort. But I can definitely see your point.

> Are there new cars with warm LED lights?

I don't know actually, but I've definitely not seen any on the road. I wonder why, as far as I know it's not a technical issue.

I own a 90s BMW and the interior lighting looks phenomenal in that car. Not great for passenger night reading or applying makeup though. Haha

It seems like such needless work. All I want are ~3000k LED widgets in various standard-automotive sizes that aren't stupid.

What I get are ~3000k LED widgets that are overdriven and painful to be around at night, which also have extra "CANBUS" resistors that only serve as heaters.

It's all pretty repulsive. Some recentl examples I got consumed 2.6 Watts, and about half of that was deliberately wasted as nothing but heat.

(2.6 Watts is quite a lot for a little LED board to dissipate, which results in early failures and flickering and other nonsense.)

But with the stupid heater-resistors removed, that dropped to only an eye-burning 1.3 Watts.

With the current-limiting resistor swapped to a higher value, power consumption was reduced to a few hundred mW and the light output approximated the relatively-unintrusive incandescent lamp that was originally fitted.

And finally, after all of that work of finding and modding the things, I can open the car door at night without becoming blind -- just like it was the 1990s again -- and also preserve the battery for things like starting the engine.

Good on you for fighting the warm light fight!

I can literally preserve my whole night vision and have zero eye strain in pitch black conditions by red shifting my computer screen. No one supports this because we are stupid.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biological_effects_of_high-ene...

The laser pointer community of all groups understands this stuff well. They recommend green lasers because they use the lowest power for the highest visibility at night. Blue lasers are easy to get super powerful, but unlike a lower powered green one, which usually will only temporarily blind you if you make a mistake - a powerful blue laser will straight up destroy your eyes forever. Permanent blindness.

But note that the wikipedia article you link states clearly that the eye strain attributed to blue light has no scientific evidence. That's also what I found out last time I looked into it - all those very strong statements about how dangerous blue light emission is supposed to be has no equivalent scientific studies that prove them. I think there was also a prominent article about that here on HN.

I think the effect might be completely made up, as it is something that is easy to believe and to subjectively feel that it works, by a placebo effect basically.

The blue light problem has to do with how high energy blue photons interact with specific substances found in minute quantities in our eyes, leading to inflammation.

Further, actual studies of filteirng blue light needed the right display tech. Before OLED, I couldn't actually "turn off the non red pixels", and thus never fully eliminated blue light from my display. Most of the "science" around blue light is trash. Yes, I say this as someone who actively published at top AI conferences and is intimately familiar with peer review.

I'm going to keep on preserving my night vision and browsing the internet for hours with zero issues at night while being told that my red shifted phone is placebo. You try turning your OLED phone on at full brightness in the middle of the night with and without the red-shift and tell me which hurts your eyes more...

Please notice two things: 1. It's not even about whether blue light might be harder on the eyes in general, but whether it matters on the brightness levels consumer devices are usually used (so astronomers are completely irrelevant to that discussion, and so is a modern phone at night at full brightness) and what the actual effects are in practice 2. It's an astonishing position to take, to at the one hand realize there is no scientific basis for the claim, but still act 100% convinced. Especially for an academic.

It's also not obvious why "night vision preservation" might be relevant. We are not talking about looking at things during the dark, but at (more or less brighly) illuminated objects.

I don't have skin in this game and likely won't respond further. I even have a weak red light shift active while writing this (I feel like it might help with the sleep rhythm a bit). But I am absolutely saying that claims like this need scientific evidence and that it is foolish to believe in such things only because it's currently a popular claim, to take that position that absolutely. This is not the correct way of thinking, and there is no need to not leave space for doubt.

This has been my major frustration also. Different enthusiast communities all discover these things independently and talk about them in their own domain language. Night photography and astral photography talks about red shifting as well.

Probably not what you are aiming for but for Linux this is a somewhat solved problems. The default DM, Gnome, has built-in color shift with a time schedule AFAIK. For Wayland and xorg there are also numerous other solutions that do a display-level redshift, I can recommend wl-sunset for Wayland.

I personally buy surplus cinema lighting equipment and use it to light my house. I have a bunch of fancy cinematic LEDs with high CRIs that produce decent light, although they still can't fully compete with tungsten bulbs (e.g. Arrilite series)

Ideally you want to be looking for something with a color temperature in the 3500K (mid-morning) to 6500K (clear blue noon day) range and a CRI of 95+. Also bug manufacturers to start using better color quality metrics like TM-30.

I went down a high CRI office lighting rabbit hole last year and I could only find expensive, new photography lights.

Sure, it's not cheap, but IMO ~1$/W plus simple PSU (either some standard voltage, or dimmable current, depending on what you got) for good and 1.5~2$/W for very good CRI is quite fine.

They’re quite expensive compared to normal LED bulbs, but it’s hard to argue against the quality of life improvement, particularly in the winter where I work remotely from a home office all day.

I was actually considering setting up an high brightness array of their full spectrum lighting above my desk. I know the article mentions diffuse lighting is best, but for some odd reason I prefer “spotlight” style. I don’t know why—it just feels cozier to me.

One thing I’ve noticed as I’ve learned more about lighting is that the brighter the light, the better cool color temperatures start to look. For a long time I hated anything above 3000K (too “office-like”) but 4000K actually starts looking pretty good around ~7,000 lumens directly overhead, and I imagine 5000K would look alright above 15,000 lumens or so (perceived brightness is a logarithmic function of luminance). IMO 5000K looks downright ghastly in a home setting for the typical range of 500-800 lumens that most bulbs sell at nowadays.

For mounting, it depends. Some things, like Pavotubes, come with screw-in mounting solutions. Other stuff may require dedicated photo mounting hardware. Manfrotto Superclamps and similar are a great way to mount lights to random pipes, beams, etc.

Also, most cinema lighting supports DMX control, which is nice for automation. It's harder to set up than Zigbee, but it works a lot better once you get it set up. That bit is definitely not consumer-friendly though.

Go out and buy cheap Christmas lights and expensive ones, and put them up next to each there, and show them that. The difference is staggering. To the point where they look dumb if you hang them up together.

I also try to buy lightning fixtures that are designed anti-glare although they are more expensive. You can also make pendant lights yourself with led strips and aluminium profiles.

Your eyesight and glasses also matter a lot. My glasses are quite worn with lots of scratches. They definitely make issues worse.

You can, of course, make great photos in any light. Golden hour and blue hour are easy because the light is inherently nice.

This is more just a comment written to get folks who are considering lighting to think critically about it for the first time. The average person plops a bright stand lamp in a corner of the room and calls it a day, maybe with a dimmer if they're a bit advanced. The fact that you have an opinion about golden hour lighting means you're already beyond that point :)

I do find however, that using diffuse lighting and minimizing shadows is what makes lighting feel artificial.

Natural sunlight has very parallel rays that create very evenly lit surfaces with very sharp shadows. Whereas most artificial light has radial rays around the light source that diminish in intensity with the cube of the distance and thus create fading gradients on surfaces and weak shadows especially if you have many of them.

I find I miss the feel of parallel rays of natural light so I try to find lights that have for example, parabolic reflectors to make the rays more parallel and position a few of them farther away from me pointed towards my visual field to try to replicate natural sunlight coming through a window.

One challenge however, is that it's surprisingly difficult to get good parallel rays from artificial light sources because of conservation of etendue ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etendue ). I wish there were more options on the market.

[This video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bqBsHSwPgw&t=843s) does a good job of showing how to make your own, as well as illustrating how good the effect is, while also demonstrating why space-hog implementations are likely to yield good results and slimmer ones not.

Meanwhile home lighting is well below the 500 lux range, if not even in the 100-200.

I even suspect that the current near-sightedness epidemic is caused by people spending too much time in dim lighting. Maybe if our indoor lighting was brighter our eyesight would not adapt to become near-sighted as much.

That's not enough for the light to feel natural though, you also have to have the parallel rays. And then there's also challenges with brighter lighting to set it up so it's not uncomfortably bright in your field of view or blinding you :-)

It's not that eyes are adapting to low light so much as the fact that exposure to 10k lux stimulates the release of neurotransmitters which prevent the eye from growing too quickly. Last I checked, the recommendation is for children to spend 2+ hours per day outdoors in sunlight. Morning and evening aren't sufficiently lit so it really comes down to school and after-school care scheduling enough outdoors time.

This is huge. I personally can not stand warm color temperatures in my office or bedroom, I know all the colors are off and it aggravates me to no end. On the other hand, I can't stand cool color temperatures in the dining room because it doesn't lend well to eating comfortably. And in either case, I can't stand warm color temperatures on any monitors/screens or televisions because of the same reason as when I'm in my office or bedroom.

Use color temperatures that suit your preferences, going against them just because someone says it's better for you (eg: red shift at night, aka blue light fearmongering) is patented bullshit.

But I also wonder - why has there been such wide adoption of overhead recessed lighting? To me they’re a big part of why lighting in modern homes looks harsh.

Recessed lighting with parabolic reflectors collimates light conically, which is more similar sunlight than omnidirectional lighting that passes through a diffuser. The sun is basically a point source so far away that the light rays that reach us are almost parallel. To me it feels much “cozier” than soft lighting, which gives everything a bland, washed out look and makes me sleepy during the work day.

I was even thinking about replacing my surface mount LED lighting with recessed cans. But everyone is obviously quite different in their preferences haha. If you want more diffuse lighting, there are filters and lenses they sell that you can slide into the cans.

> If you want more diffuse lighting, there are filters and lenses they sell that you can slide into the cans.

Any idea what they’re called or what to look for? I’ve tried searching and only found whole recessed cans that come with those filters but not something that I can fit into the cans I already have.