How to Choose Accent Lighting for Pictures

Posted on June 1, 2010
Filed Under Accent Lighting, Lighting Tips

The accent lightings for pictures are used to draw everybody’s attention to one of the most important details of the interior. Rightly chosen and installed lighting for pictures allows accentuating the advantages of the painting and save it from damages. In order to be able to choose among the numerous variants we offer to you to study the main types of the accent lighting.

The choice of the accent lighting first of all depends on how and to what the painting is fixed. For example, to light the pictures hanging on the beams the spot lights are generally used. They give the accurately directed light to a certain sector of the surface. The spot lights can be easily installed on at any distance form the painting. Besides, you can change the angle of slope and rotation.

If the painting is hanging on the wall or on the ropes, special accent lightings are used. They are installed on the surface above the picture. Such accent lightings use all types of lamps: glow, halogen, luminescent and LED. The choice of light source depends on several factors. For example, the glow lamp gives pleasant for our eyes “warm” light, but it gets hot quickly and changes the shades of red, blue and yellow colours. Such lamps are better to use for the pictures protected by glass. Otherwise they should be installed at minimum 20-50 cm from the picture.

Silkscreens and graphics are very often accentuated with the help of halogen lamps. But halogen lamps also get hot quickly so they should be installed at a distance of 20 – 50 cm from the picture.

One of the most popular types of accents lighting is a luminescent lighting. The luminescent lamps are 5-6 times brighter than glow lamps and serve 10-20 times longer. But this type of lamps contains a small quantity of mercury so when the lamp stops working it should be brought to special utilization centers.

One of the best variants of accent lighting is LED lamps. They don’t get hot, serve for a long time and don’t require special effort for utilization. Multilight diodes of red, blue and green are good for accentuating the colours in which the picture is painted. But this technology is new and still quite expensive.

As far as the size of accent lighting is concerned the optimal dimensions are 2/3 or 3/4 from the length of the picture together with the frame. If you need to light the picture only the light ray should correspond to the width of the painting without the frame.