How To Set A Room’s Mood With Smart Lighting
Cold or Warm? Each Has Its Place
Smart lighting is made available in several colors, which would allow you to change the color of a room to match your current needs. For example, “colder” lighting makes someone feel more productive and focused and it is best suited for an office. This is why so many office buildings make use of harsh fluorescent lighting.
On the flip side, “warmer” lighting such as candlelight or overhead lighting in restaurants promotes a deep sense of relaxation.
You can tweak the color of the lighting in present your home to change your mood, but first, you will have to understand how color psychology works. After that, it is a simple matter of just changing the lights to suit your needs.
Color Psychology
Color psychology is an extensive and very complex field, and the science of it is not conclusive. Still, if you want to try it, here are a few basics you have to keep in mind:
- Red is associated with power: Red color can help to stimulate your appetite, which makes it an ideal color to have in a kitchen or dining room. In the areas of lighting, it gives you a sense of urgency. In less intense shades, it can help with being relaxed.
- Blue is calming: Although blue color gets a bad reputation for interrupting the circadian rhythm, soft blue light can often be helpful in offices and in workplaces as a productivity booster.
- Purple helps stimulate creativity: If you are an artist, a writer, a designer, or a photographer, or you are just working through a difficult problem, soft purple lighting in the room can help.
- Green causes the lowest amount of eye strain: This would be ideal color to have in a bedroom or living room to put you at ease as you relax and catch up on your favorite TV series.
- Orange and yellow are usually associated with the sunrise: Both colors are ideal for soft lighting in the morning as you get ready to welcome a sense of happiness and contentment in you.
Of course, there are several color temperatures of light, as well. For example, a cool white color has a bluish tint that encourages you to focus and be alert, but it can disturb your sleeping cycle. A warm white light is a perfect option for relaxing and un-winding down before you go to bed, but it is not the best choice for an office environment.
How to Set a Room’s Mood with Smart Lighting
The Philips Hue and similar smart lights make it possible to change the color of the light that is inside a room on the fly. Setting specific scenes allows you to remember the same settings at just the tap of a button.
We will demonstrate how to do this with Philips Hue lighting, but you can as well use any smart lighting system that gives you configurable colors.
To do this, you will need the Philips Hue app on your mobile device, a Hue Bridge, and at least one Hue light with colors. Open up the Philips Hue app. Choose one of the rooms.
After you choose a room, a color wheel would appear.
You can move the pointer around the wheel to select the color and shade that you want. Alternatively, if you tap on the painter’s palette icon located in the upper-right corner, you can then choose from a series of preset scenes. If you have more than one bulb in your room, each bulb would reflect a different color as part of the scene.
You can also create your own scene. To do that, just tap on the “New Scene” found in the upper-left corner. In the next screen, enter in a name for your scene and choose the colors that you want to incorporate within it.
This tool is particularly very powerful; you can even choose an image and have your scene incorporate its ambient colors. There are several preset images in it, but you can also choose one from your device camera roll.
