I started reefing with power compact lights. That was a long time ago. I graduated into metal halides and now use a light fixture with both metal halides and t5s. A year or two ago I added reefbrite xho's for dawn/dusk effect and to enjoy that pop at least for a short part of the day. My goal has always been to get both good growth and good color under metal halides. I guess I am old enough, and have reefed long enough, that I just have always thought of metal halides as the best of lighting. Certainly over the years, LEDS have continued to progress in terms of both their popularity and success at growing and coloring sps. Although, I would like to switch to LEDS to save the expense of electricity and the incredible heat of metal halides, I am just so set in my ways. Although, hopefully at some point I will transition to LEDS perhaps like G4 Radions or some type of Kessil or who knows what plus t5's. One of my many concerns is how to get good photography, accurate color rendition out of LEDS. When I look at friend's tanks lit by leds, the colors can be truly amazing. Much more vivid and fluorescent than metal halides can ever show. I have tried and tried to take photos of my corals just lit by leds but really have not been very successful at it. I tried some different methods today and have been a little more successful in my opinion. So I thought I would share some photos under just blue leds and I think perhaps these are close to what they really look like under that light. In Lightroom, I had to increase the exposure a significant amount because the pictures were otherwise dark. I set the temperature to 20 k on each of these photos but I always do that with metal halide pictures as well. Some pictures came out looking oversaturated so I reduced the light on those. So that was it in lightroom, 1) temperature adjusted to 20 k, 2) exposure increased substantially, and 3) some pictures had the "lights" reduced. This is far from perfect but I am getting closer to capturing the blue LED lighting "look" of these acros. Some of the pictures came out terrible, so I did not include those but regardless of what lighting I use, there are always photos that come out as poor representatives of what is actually seen. I hope you enjoy my blue LED pictures.
This coral looks good under any lighting but certainly with LEDS, there are much more vividness to the acro (Is vividness really a word)
TGC Inferno
RR Asia Ray's Rainbow
I think these are really fascinating pictures. I have more to share but I will wait for tomorrow