Important Tips on Color & Lighting

It's so nice to have a guest blog post from Emily Widle of Pegasus Lighting. The topic is perfect, Color and Lighting and we all know how important lighting is to color. It can make or bread a color scheme.

So come read all about it and Emily, thanks so much!

Choosing a paint color involves more than picking up a gallon of your favorite color in a hue with an interesting name. Color tends to interact with your home, so the color you choose at the paint store may look very different once it’s up on your walls. 

You have probably already given some thought to how your paint color might coordinate with and complement your furniture, flooring, and décor. But have you considered how color will interplay with your home’s unique lighting? 

Whether you have a lot of natural light streaming in during the day or a mix of incandescent, fluorescent, and LED light fixtures lighting your home day and night, each light source will have an impact on your wall color.

Color intensifies in a dark room and becomes lighter in a room with sunlight streaming in. Also, color may appear differently depending on the “color rendering” of a light bulb. Color rendering is defined as a light bulb’s ability to render colors accurately. It is measured on a 1 to 100 scale, with 1 being low pressure sodium lighting (seen in some street lamps that give off very yellow light), and 100 being the sun. 

If you love the paint color you select, you want your lighting fixtures to have a fairly high color rendering index, or CRI. That way, your lighting won’t transform your paint color. A CRI of 85 is considered to be very good. 

The best way to make sure the paint color is right for your home is to paint a sample on a few walls! Watch how it interacts with your lighting during different times of the day. 

Once you paint the walls, you may find that you need to make a few lighting changes, too. Dark paint colors tend to visually suck up the lighting. It’s perfectly fine to have a kitchen with a rich, dark hue, but if you find that your light fixtures no longer illuminate your countertops as well, you might want to add under cabinet light fixtures if you don’t have them already, or incorporate brighter light bulbs into pendants and recessed cans.

 

Remember that color and lighting go hand in hand and you have a paint color that you love - day or night.