Considerations for Creating an Effective Retail Lighting Scheme

Color rendition (or color rendering) describes how well or poorly a light source portrays the color of objects, as perceived by the human eye. In many applications, “accuracy” is the most important color rendering metric. Retailer stores, however, have unique lighting and color rendition needs.

In a retail setting such as grocery or clothing stores, lighting considerations often include not only color accuracy, but also enhancement. The goal is not necessarily to achieve “perfect” color rendition but instead to create an “exciting” visual appearance with vivid colors that draw consumers’ attention and increase product appeal.

The optimal lighting is accurate (high fidelity) to present products with naturalistic color, comfortable for shoppers to remain in the store for longer periods of time and has characteristics that make colors “pop”. Using LED lights with different spectra to increase certain wavelengths of light (sometimes called “color pumping”) can make objects appear more vibrant.

An example of retail lighting that is bright and naturalistic, creating a comfortable atmosphere for shoppers to linger and showing products off to advantage.

Textile manufacturers may even include optical brightening agents (OBAs) in fabrics that help the whites and colors appear more vivid. OBAs use the phenomenon of fluorescence, absorbing invisible near-ultraviolet (UV) wavelengths and re-emitting them as visible blue light. It is the emitted blue light that makes the fabrics appear brighter to our eyes. As fluorescent lighting (which has a significant UV output) has been replaced with more efficient LEDs, LED products have been designed deliberately to include UV wavelength content to activate OBAs.

Many LED products intended for retail settings incorporate near-UV wavelengths to enhance the effect of OBAs. However, some designers have concerns about using near-UV light around humans (although the wavelengths used in these lighting applications are not the harmful UVB, UVC, or even the least hazardous UVA (315-400 nm)). It is most accurately categorized as “near-UV”. Nevertheless, to address these concerns, Luminus now offers UV-free retail lighting solutions with our Sensus™ line.

Sensus™ for Superior Retail Lighting

Luminus Sensus LEDs provide consistent bright whites and pure colors, with 90+ CRI, R_f of 93 and R_g of 102 at 3000K. Unlike most LEDs intended for retail lighting, Sensus and Xtreme Sensus LEDs from Luminus are designed to provide bright vivid whites and colors without using any near-UV wavelengths to excite brightening agents. Instead, we reference the latest research about human color preference and visual perception of “pure white” light.

The image below is a color rendition report in TM-30-18 report format (refer to our White Paper, Achieving Optimal Color Rendition with LEDs for more information about TM-30 measures and reporting) demonstrating the extremely high color fidelity and rendition performance of Sensus LEDs.

Sensus 3000K (30-95-AC42) LED color rendering performance, in TM-30-18 report format. TM-30-20 Intent ratings for this product are [P1, V-, F2]. Note that The Sensus component shown here is designed to enhance vividness but has a V- score. This is because the saturation increase is rotated slightly towards the blue hue bins and the Rcs,h1 value is slightly below zero.

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