Spectrometer Makes Filmmakers See Red Cinematographers hate fluorescent lights. Although these light sources look more or less normal to the human eye, they show up as green on film. Worse, they impart a weird and unhealthy greenish cast to everything they illuminate, including human flesh tones. While oddball hues may not seriously affect someone's Christmas snapshots, they are a major problem for big Hollywood film productions. Color meters have trouble reading these complexities, making it difficult to know what filters to put on the camera to compensate.
Color films see light differently than the human eye does.
The lights were generating green spikes in such odd places that I was wondering if there was a solution. Fancy digital software can fix this in postproduction, but the costs are exorbitant. With an S2000 miniature fiber optic spectrometer manufactured by Ocean Optics Inc. and a laptop computer, Bogdanowicz arrives on location to solve lighting problems. The equipment allows him to take readings at a higher degree of accuracy than standard color meters, which work only with light sources that give off a continuous, even, broad illumination. He said the small size, light weight and portability of the outfit are major pluses in the motion picture industry, where it is important for the technical support to fade into the background.