Color rendition adapters for flashlights???

Is this possible and worthwhile?

I've seen red filters adapters for lights, that turns the beam red.
How useful will it be to have an adapter that helps to improve color rendition, so you can see better outdoors.

I understand that making such an adapter (if possible) will likely reduce the output of light, however when selecting a warm led emitter you get less light anyway compared to a cooler emitter.

So will the loss of light from the use of an adapter be significantly worse than choosing a warm emitter, to make this exercise not worthwhile.

I guess, i'm thinking about having the best of both worlds here!. It would be nice to have a cooler emitter for higher lumens. However, when outdoor in the bushes, it would be great if you can simply add on an adapter to improve color rendition, so you can more easily differentiate the branches from the leaves.

It will save heaps of $$$ from buying 2 separate lights with different color emitters for different purposes and will make purchasing light decision alot more simpler.

Actually improving color rendition is not really feasible -- you can shift the color temperature easily, by filtering down the blue, but that doesn't help CRI that much, because you still have a deep blue/violet peak and a yellow peak, with a depression in the blue/cyan range and a short tail on the red end. Since your filter can't add light, you'd have to heavily filter both the yellow and blue peaks, down to match the cyan and red regions (which must be passed unchanged), to improve color rendering much, and it would be much dimmer.

If all you want is a neutral or warm white for aesthetic reasons, you will get less light by filtering cool white than by using a neutral or warm white emitter, because the phosphor re-emits the absorbed blue light as yellow light in the lower-CCT emitters, but the filter will simply absorb the blue light with no re-emission (and actually must absorb even more to reach the same CCT, because there's no boost to the yellow). How big a difference this is, I'm not sure, but the filtering is definitely worse off. I wouldn't think it's worthwhile, but then I don't think warm emitters are worthwhile either...

Good colour rendition requires a continuous spectrum, which is why incandescent lights historically do better in this regard than LED lights. Even with phosphors LED sources tend to have gaps in the spectrum in between the discrete frequencies of the emitters.

Adding a filter can only remove light from the spectrum - it can't add light to fill in the gaps. So, no I don't think it's going to help that much.

Lol a solar panel with a p60 attached that clips onto your led light would be feasible. Doubt thats what you want though.

Using a warm or neutral white LED will still be more efficient then using a filter. Filters block light while a different phosphor changes more of the light into the lower spectrum colors.

there was a thread on adjusing LED tints with filters.

link: https://www.candlepowerforums.com/threads/216351

from the little response i guess its not a very popular option. :shakehead

*but i do use this option.