Introductory experiments on preferred picture illuminations

In recent years the possibilities of museum lighting changed considerably; museum curators have become more and more aware of the fact that natural daylight might be harmful to some pigments, and the illumination of pictures should be controlled to be able to preserve their quality for future generations. In this paper we report about a pilot project in which we tried to make the task of the observers as easy as possible. In our experiments we used a colour tuneable light source, with which the subjects were requested to set the most pleasing light, when the source illuminated real paintings (painted copies of classical art work). Observers were asked for the most preferred correlated colour temperature. The main goal of this study was to find best CCT of the illuminant. The other goal was to find which personal (like gender) indicators, settings of illuminants can influence the colour preference.