Elation is proud to introduce two groundbreaking lighting technologies: ColourTune and TruTone. These innovations represent significant advancements in lighting precision, offering designers unparalleled color finesse and design flexibility.
ColourTune Technology: Unrivaled Lighting Precision
ColourTune is new lighting fixture software that enables precise control over output and color accuracy across Elation’s full-spectrum LED fixtures. With ColourTune, users can customize lighting output to meet their exact needs, whether emphasizing brightness or color fidelity. It offers a comprehensive suite of features, ensuring adaptability and color precision for the highest quality lighting designs.
Developed under the guidance of Bob Mentele, Associate Product Manager at Elation, ColourTune is the result of over a year of dedicated research, development, and testing. Mentele emphasizes its transformative potential, stating, “This advanced software represents a significant advancement in lighting control and precision and will be a great benefit to the designer who seeks to maximize the potential of our full-spectrum LED products, including fixtures already in the market.”
Key features of ColourTune include:
- Color Tuning: Users can select from Highest Output, Highest Fidelity, or a balanced blend, tailoring lighting performance to specific applications. Highest Output prioritizes intensity, while Highest Fidelity emphasizes light quality. The Balanced mode offers an ideal mix of both.
- Output Balance: A Uniform setting ensures consistent intensity across multiple fixtures of the same model, and/or ensures closely matched CCT and colors for differing models sharing Elation’s full-spectrum engine, for a more homogenous system. A Bright setting maximizes output at the expense of uniformity.
- 16-bit CCT Control: Precise color temperature adjustments as fine as 1-degree Kelvin provide unmatched accuracy, crucial for TV and film production. Seamless crossfades between 2400K and 8500K further enhance flexibility.
- White Point Adjustment: Users can set a desired CCT value and mix colors from that point or select from a virtual swatch book, adjusting saturation levels for harmonious results across incandescent and LED fixtures.
- Dim to Warm: This feature emulates the natural glow of tungsten lamps, seamlessly fading color temperature as the fixture is dimmed.
- Virtual Swatch Book Fade: Smooth transitions and dynamic lighting effects are achieved by fading between two virtual swatch book color selections, with options to adjust pre-built swatch color points for greater color customization.
Mentele notes that ColourTune was developed in response to calls from designers. “Designers have been asking for greater color fidelity and more options in color and CCT control, and ColourTune is the result of that feedback.”
ColourTune is available on select Elation fixtures, including the Fuze Teatro, KL PAR FC, KL PAR FC IP, and SŌL I Blinder, with updates for existing KL and Fuze series fixtures in progress. ColourTune will be implemented into all new full-spectrum Elation fixtures moving forward.
TruTone Technology: Advancing Lighting Fidelity
Elation’s R&D department embarked on a development project that spanned several years to tackle the challenge of achieving the perfect balance between color accuracy and intensity. The result is TruTone technology, a groundbreaking advancement that allows designers to adjust CRI from a single fixture in order to find the best lighting fidelity.
The core concept behind TruTone is ingeniously simple yet profoundly impactful: a fusion of high and low white CRI LEDs into a single, high-density optical array that allows for CRI adjustments across a range from CRI 70 to 93. The system blends light smoothly with no switching or stepping and without any visible artifacts or disruptions in color temperature. Its advantage—the flexibility to adjust color rendering in a single fixture to cater to various lighting needs while presenting a new approach to fine-tuning the tone and depth of color—makes the system wholly unique.
The advantages of TruTone extend beyond white light. “We quickly learned that the system has a huge influence on the color mixing system as well,” says Elation Product Manager Matthias Hinrichs. “It allows you to shift colors from a cold balance to a warm one and create some beautiful warm theatrical colors. It’s an adjustment in fidelity and a new way of influencing color.” In short, by changing the spectral composition of how a color is built, it gives the designer an expanded range of color variations to choose from. Theatre and television designers have been particularly impressed with the new palettes they can create.
TruTone’s adjustable CRI accommodates a broad spectrum of applications, eliminating the need for multiple fixture variants. A single fixture can serve dual roles in a show, from highlighting a presenter with high CRI keylight then repositioning to a rock band for full-on power looks; or illuminating a car at an auto show then repositioning onto a DJ at high output, TruTone’s seamless CRI transitioning is unique and is the only system in which this is possible.
Elation’s new Proteus Odeon framing profile moving head is the first fixture to feature TruTone, with plans to implement the technology in other Elation fixtures moving forward. “I think when designers see the possibilities, they will realize the real impact it can have on their designs,” Hinrichs concludes.
Elation is excited to bring the ColourTune and TruTone technologies to the market and invites you to take a closer look at www.elationlighting.com.
For more information or to schedule a product demo, contact Elation at (323) 582-3322, sales@elationlighting.com.