Orange street light

[gensei]

After trying to do paint correction myself using LC orange pad and megs fine cut cleaner i thought i had done areasonable job with only fluros as main light
I then discovered after parking under an orange street light every scratch known to man seemed to appear
Just wondering if anyone else has ever noticed this themselves and whether this may be a good light for detailing - meaning an orange light
Dan just saw the fantastic job you did on blue mps,s car i live in Malvern will pm you soon too see what if anything you can do for my red gen 1 and maybe make an appointment

[Caffeine Fiend]

Hi Mate,

The orange streetlight is a High Pressure Sodium light, and the main reason you're seeing the scratches and swirls is because of its brightness more than anything else. They're terrible at colour rendition (everything looks orange), but very good at spreading large amounts of light relatively cheaply. Which is why many street and carpark lighting situations use them.

The other main type of street light you see about is Metal Halide. This is a much whiter light (higher colour temperature) and has a more directional spread than the HPS. Park your car under one of these and you'll see even more.

Fluorescent lighting is good, but you need a lot of it to properly show paint defects.

Ultimately the best light source is the sun, but it's impractical to detail cars in direct sunlight. As a result, many detailers use multiple types of lights to try to simulate the lighting effect of the sun (generally, different light sources at different colour temperatures pick up different defects). Usually a combination of fluorescent, halogen, LED, and sometimes Metal Halide (though MH is quite pricey compared to the others)

Happy to have a chat with you . With the help of my lovely wife, an electrical engineer who specialises in lighting, in a few weeks I'll have my garage lighting set up specifically for detailing. Lighting is a big factor in detailing, as you can't correct what you can't see.

Dan

[MattMPS3]

I had a similar experience with my car, in the sun it looked nice and shiny (you could see the swirl marks etc), but when I put it in my parents garage under the fluoro lights, I could see water marks covering the roof and bonnet, very similar colour temperature between the 2 light sources, but the diffused light from the fluoros hid the swirls, but brought out the watermarks.

You would probably also find that orange light diffuses less (as its closer to the red end of the spectrum) so the scratches would become a bit more obvious, a blue light source on the other hand would diffuse a lot, hiding the imperfections. So just keep parking under those blue light they use to keep the junkies away and you'll be fine.