Art Exhibition Lighting Lab

Gallery Spotlight

Colour temperature 3200 K

Fixture height above canvas 1.4 m

Beam cone angle 34°

Lamp output 400 W

Readouts

CCT

3200 K

Illuminance

— lx

Beam Ø on canvas

— m

Seed

—

How it works

Two independent light-physics rules decide how a gallery spotlight actually renders a painting, and this lab lets you drive both directly.

1. Colour temperature (Planckian locus). A tungsten-halogen track light near 2700–3200 K reads warm/amber; a daylight-balanced LED near 5500–6500 K reads cool/white. The slider drives a standard blackbody-radiator RGB approximation so the fixture's actual colour and the canvas swatch stay physically consistent with the Kelvin value.

2. Inverse-square law. Illuminance falls off with the square of the distance from source to surface:

E = k · P / d²
E = illuminance at the canvas (lx, arbitrary-scaled)
P = lamp output (W)
d = fixture-to-canvas distance (m)

Raising the fixture (larger d) dims the canvas quadratically, not linearly — double the height and the painting gets roughly a quarter the light, exactly as it does in a real gallery hang. The beam-cone angle sets how wide a circle of wall the light actually covers: spot Ø = 2·d·tan(angle/2), shown live under "Beam Ø on canvas".

Each "New Painting" draws a fresh procedural composition onto the canvas texture from one of three generative algorithms — a Perlin-flow-field stroke field, a set of orbiting parametric arcs, or a fractured Voronoi-like shard tiling — so you can compare how the same lighting setup reads across genuinely different artworks.

Drag to orbit · scroll to zoom

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