How to choose good uplight colors
By Adrian Cavlan
Hello again! Just a quick one here…
Uplights have been a fixture (no pun intended) at weddings now for the last decade or so. Funny thing - they add so much ambience to almost any space. Sometimes they can be used to make a rather plain or uninteresting space come to life by adding not only vibrant color but also dimension. Other times, in very beautiful or inherently interesting spaces, they can be used very subtly to accent and enhance the natural beauty of the environments they are in. Very versatile, they are.
So - what factors play a part in how these lights are used? I’d say two are most prominent: placement and color(s).
In beautiful spaces, we typically recommend placements that are meant to accentuate the beauty of an existing attraction. Think perhaps a light amber placed underneath a statue or a nice tree. Or, perhaps the walls have historic murals or hanging art pieces: again, a muted, more neutral shade will call these features out rather than overpower them with an unnaturally bright or incompatible illumination.
The Olympic Club in San Francisco - the uplights are just the finishing touch
In more plain spaces, or perhaps one with features you’d rather de-emphasize (i.e. big red EXIT lights above each door or fire extinguishers along the wall), it can be a good idea to go for bolder colors at more powerful settings, placed in such a way that these lights themselves become the decor, thus taking the eye off of the items you’d rather not be seen. In this case, we might suggest trying to play off of the tones already present in your florals or other decor, but, again, going more aggressively with brighter versions of them.
Pipe & drape, some hanging decor and our uplighting turn this high school gym into a dreamscape!
A couple of small side notes to keep in mind:
These days, most professional lighting companies are offering battery-powered, wireless DMX-controlled LED uplights. This of course eliminates having to run hundreds of feet of cable to enable power and on-the-fly light control, and, perhaps most importantly, keeps the fixtures cool to the touch, thus eliminating fire danger and the possibility of people being burned(!) if they come into contact with the fixture.
In the old days, RGB was the standard for LED uplights, and you could only get a certain range of shades from them, but these days it’s relatively common to see RGBWA+UV fixtures, which have the advantage of offering a true white, a true amber, and ultraviolet (the “UV”) elements that can be used to offer an amazing array of shades within the colors.
Some brands are a lot better than others with regard to trueness in color, battery life, and fixture appearance. As with anything, quality does not come cheap. Good uplight fixtures can run as high as $500 each!
Well, that’s about it! Hope that you have found this post… ahhhem… illuminating LOL!