Led light panels for copying paintings

[deanwork]

Can anyone recommend a good moderately priced  light panel for copying paintings up to 40” x 60” with a dslr ?

And how long do the bulbs last ?  Are any of the led bulbs adequate to capture the entire color spectrum ?

If not, what would be suggested as a light source ( besides daylight ) . Trying to avoid hot lights….

John

[achourasweet]

I don’t have any experience with painting, but I would use studio lighting to capture the right colors. LEDs might distort the original colors to some extent and make them colder than they are. Of course, you will be able to fix that during post-processing, but I still think a softer studio light would be better.
If you decide to use studio equipment, I recommend using a power socket with a smart function that can protect the lighting from power surges in the grid. The studio lights are rather sensitive and should not be connected to unreliable power sources.

[langier]

I'm now doing that with some Chinese-mad rgb/bi-color LED panels. I usually set them around 4500°K and the first shot includes my gray balance card to get the color zeroed-out. Much faster/easier than setting up my Elinchrom lighting, especially for smaller projects.

They aren't the brightest panels but adequate to light most paintings I reproduce. AFAIK, the color quality on the bi-color LED array is close enough and doesn't need to much tweaking after balancing using the digital gray card. You may need to shop-around and read a few reviews to see what panels may work the best, but from my experience one doesn't need the most expensive panels as needed in the past when a lot of the panels had a hideous green tint.

The panels I'm using now are the Packetlite F7 and are a few years old, charging via USB-C and run maybe 3+ hours on a charge. I think I bought one to give it a try then ended up buying a couple more and they seemed to be consistent between the units unlike the bi-color panels I had ten years ago.

For a 40x60 I'd think you may need two on either side to have enough photons to light up your painting.