Kelvin Scale - Digital Photography

Don Stauffer in Minnesota wrote:
On Aug 2, 9:11 am, wrote:
I have read that increasing the "warmth" of the Kelvin setting
improves sunrises/sunsets. My camera does not use the Kelvin scale and
I have been experimenting using the three fluorescent settings on my
Fuji S5200, which adds a little yellow, red, or both to a picture.
--Does anyone know how these settings relate to Kelvin numbers?
--Also, can anyone explain what the three types of fluorescent are?
Presumably, one is the old-fashioned very cold light and one the
newer, more-natural light, but which is which?

Color temperature strictly applies only to a broad continuum type
radiation, characteristic of hot bodies. Fluorescent light is
characterized by several rather narrow regions in the spectrum. The
more and broader these lines, the more it approaches a continuum like
sunlight. So fluorescent light is not necessarily colder. It is just
not a smooth curve.

Of course, one must also be aware of the difference between human
reaction and psychological response. Blue light has a higher color
temp than red light, but it is referred to by humans as cooler.

The natural emission from a fluorescent light is actually ultraviolet,
and there are phosphors that convert to the UV light to various
visible wavelengths. Even so, the spectrum is pretty choppy, and it
is hard to get good color photography from such lights. But they are
definitely getting better.

A few years ago my granddaughter was in a school production in a site
with a lot of sunlight coming in, room lights were fluorescent, and
stage lights were tungsten. Some of the action was far back on the stage
where the light was mostly tungsten and some was on the apron where the
stage lights provided little illumination. Interesting results, to say
the least, with the P&S I had carried along. A side note: for the first
couple of decades of fluorescents only one phosphor was used and it was
horrible for color photography; some of the current "compact
fluorescents" (corkscrews in my vocabulary) still fall into that category.
Allen