A lot of the guidelines that are used to light a scene for a camera are also quite useful for lighting a room for yourself, just with less light needed as the human eye has a much higher dynamic range than a camera sensor:
* Use diffuse light. This usually means multiple light sources bouncing and diffusing light off surfaces (ceilings, walls, etc) or diffusers.
* Minimize shadows. Shadows lead to contrast which can lead to eye strain. Use multiple, maybe directional, light sources to illuminate shadows.
* Minimize highlights. Windows without blinds let in lots of light which leads to contrast and can lead to eye strain. Curtains and blinds are great ways to diffuse light.
* Uniform color temperature. Try to make sure all your lights have the same color temperature. Small variations are okay but large color temperature variations lead to color contrast which also tends to be hard on eye strain.
* Select your color temperature based on needs and feeling. A lot of people prefer warmer color temperature lights and cool temperature lights are known to be more stressful for folks with anxiety-related conditions, but if your work requires accurate color representation, or you find yourself mentally trying to compensate for color temperature, then change the temperature to what you find most productive yet relaxing.
* Wall color. Remember that "white" light that reflects off colored surfaces will take on a hue similar to the reflected surfaces. Walls of different colors can cause challenges for uniform color temperature, and warm colored walls can take cold lights and turn them warm.
A side effect, of course, is that your room will become a lot more photogenic. It's no coincidence since photogenic rooms are often just easiest on the eye to look at.
"Golden Hour" is considered a great time for photogenic events, photographs, and videos. "Golden Hour" lighting tends to be diffuse, not too strong, and warm toned. Humans tend to really like this style of lighting and if you do too, you might want to recreate some of these properties in your office.
In the history of LED lighting, it took quite a bit of work (hybrid phosphor technology, etc) to get them to emit warm color temperatures. The exact color temp can be a personal preference, but I think a lot of people aren't privy to the difference the color temperature of "white" light can make!
I want to go on a guerrilla campaign around my neighborhood and replace porch light bulbs with warm equivalents.
I just went through this with my car. All the OEM overhead interior lights were horrible 6000k+ type bulbs that not only made the interior feel like a hospital room but completely ruined my night vision turning me into the classic “Jesus!! You’re going to kill someone!” dad whenever my kids would fiddle with them at night.
I cannot overstate how much of a difference it made switching them all to 3000k warm whites. Of course instead of being replaceable bulbs they were all SMDs directly soldered onto little PCBs making it a bit of a project … but so worth it!
While the color temperature situation has improved, the actual spectral quality of most consumer LED lighting still leaves a lot to be desired. CRI makes an effort to measure this, although it's a low-granularity measurement.
I personally buy surplus cinema lighting equipment and use it to light my house. I have a bunch of fancy cinematic LEDs with high CRIs that produce decent light, although they still can't fully compete with tungsten bulbs (e.g. Arrilite series)
Ideally you want to be looking for something with a color temperature in the 3500K (mid-morning) to 6500K (clear blue noon day) range and a CRI of 95+. Also bug manufacturers to start using better color quality metrics like TM-30.
In general I think the population at large, and especially programmer types, know way too little about lighting given how ubiquitous both lighting and photography/videography is in our everyday life.
Along light temperature there's light cri as well, which measures how faithful to real life a light is. New standards such as Tm30 came out recently as well
> I think a lot of people aren't privy to the difference the color temperature of "white" light can make
Go out and buy cheap Christmas lights and expensive ones, and put them up next to each there, and show them that. The difference is staggering. To the point where they look dumb if you hang them up together.
I'm in a basement and had fairly good success with certain "led shop lights" to make the space feel more like it has natural light (though I could improve things further).
I do find however, that using diffuse lighting and minimizing shadows is what makes lighting feel artificial.
Natural sunlight has very parallel rays that create very evenly lit surfaces with very sharp shadows. Whereas most artificial light has radial rays around the light source that diminish in intensity with the cube of the distance and thus create fading gradients on surfaces and weak shadows especially if you have many of them.
I find I miss the feel of parallel rays of natural light so I try to find lights that have for example, parabolic reflectors to make the rays more parallel and position a few of them farther away from me pointed towards my visual field to try to replicate natural sunlight coming through a window.
One challenge however, is that it's surprisingly difficult to get good parallel rays from artificial light sources because of conservation of etendue ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etendue ). I wish there were more options on the market.
I've been wondering for a while now if our indoor lighting is too dim. Even in the shade during midday you're looking at 20,000 lux. Overcast days look dark and dreary and they're on the 1000-2000 lux range.
Meanwhile home lighting is well below the 500 lux range, if not even in the 100-200.
I even suspect that the current near-sightedness epidemic is caused by people spending too much time in dim lighting. Maybe if our indoor lighting was brighter our eyesight would not adapt to become near-sighted as much.
What I'm trying to achieve is lighting a bit like in these "Artificial Skylight" concepts: https://architizer.com/blog/practice/materials/let-there-be-...
They claim their technology is about "Rayleigh scattering" but I think that's mostly marketing mumbo jumbo. Sure that might add a bit of diffuse blue but their main secret, I would bet, is parallel rays which explains why their fixtures require so much space above the ceiling to get around conservation of etendue. The effect of parallel rays and sharp shadows are definitely represented in their example pictures.
I am quite sensitive to glare. I have tried many setups in my windowless office with low ceiling height and have found linear up-down pendant lights the best option. Up-light is more important as it bounces soft light from ceiling. When I want to work in dimmer environment in the evenings, I switch off the down-light.
I also try to buy lightning fixtures that are designed anti-glare although they are more expensive. You can also make pendant lights yourself with led strips and aluminium profiles.
Your eyesight and glasses also matter a lot. My glasses are quite worn with lots of scratches. They definitely make issues worse.
Glasses are extremely affordable online (e.g. eyebuydirect, owned by the same multi-billion dollar company that sells lenses and frames to local opticians) if you have the prescription, PD (pupil distance) and physical frame measurements of your current glasses.
Is there a way to diffuse light from overhead recessed lighting? For me the ‘soft’ LED bulbs I have aren’t enough. I wish there was some kind of diffusion cover I could put on the outside of the recessed housing that softens the light further but also doesn’t look like I hacked something together.
But I also wonder - why has there been such wide adoption of overhead recessed lighting? To me they’re a big part of why lighting in modern homes looks harsh.
That’s funny cause I’m going the exact opposite direction and trying to remove the diffuse lighting and replace it with very hard and bright lighting that has a spectrum as similar to sunlight as I can find/afford.
Recessed lighting with parabolic reflectors collimates light conically, which is more similar sunlight than omnidirectional lighting that passes through a diffuser. The sun is basically a point source so far away that the light rays that reach us are almost parallel. To me it feels much “cozier” than soft lighting, which gives everything a bland, washed out look and makes me sleepy during the work day.
I was even thinking about replacing my surface mount LED lighting with recessed cans. But everyone is obviously quite different in their preferences haha. If you want more diffuse lighting, there are filters and lenses they sell that you can slide into the cans.
I agree up until golden hour. It's a very specific style of lighting and isn't any better or worse. It's not the best time to take a picture, it doesn't have the best light. It's a specific kind of light.
Right I don't disagree. I just wanted to hold up golden hour as a specific example of lighting properties that humans tend to subconsciously really enjoy and evoke that as a source of inspiration for lighting your home spaces. Maybe you don't care for the overly warm temperatures but you enjoy the diffuse, desaturated look.
This is more just a comment written to get folks who are considering lighting to think critically about it for the first time. The average person plops a bright stand lamp in a corner of the room and calls it a day, maybe with a dimmer if they're a bit advanced. The fact that you have an opinion about golden hour lighting means you're already beyond that point :)
>* Select your color temperature based on needs and feeling. A lot of people prefer warmer color temperature lights and cool temperature lights are known to be more stressful for folks with anxiety-related conditions, but if your work requires accurate color representation, or you find yourself mentally trying to compensate for color temperature, then change the temperature to what you find most productive yet relaxing.
This is huge. I personally can not stand warm color temperatures in my office or bedroom, I know all the colors are off and it aggravates me to no end. On the other hand, I can't stand cool color temperatures in the dining room because it doesn't lend well to eating comfortably. And in either case, I can't stand warm color temperatures on any monitors/screens or televisions because of the same reason as when I'm in my office or bedroom.
Use color temperatures that suit your preferences, going against them just because someone says it's better for you (eg: red shift at night, aka blue light fearmongering) is patented bullshit.
A big thing not often spoken about with eye strain is dry eye caused by the lack of blinking due to focusing on screens too close to our face. This is an evolutionary phenomenon--close dangers cause extreme focus without blinking. Extreme focus on close items reduces our blinks.
Our eye lids have glands in them that release oils on your eye with each blink. These oils help prevent the watery part of your tears from evaporating. When it evaporates your eyes dry out causing discomfort and potentially pain.
If you don't blink enough, the oil doesnt get on your eyes and eventually, in extreme cases, the glands can even die. A lack of oil in tears can cause extreme eye fatigue and even pain.
This is why dry eyes is on the rise. Remember to blink!
I actually built a little web app to count my blinks. See https://dryeyestuff.com/. Not perfect, just a prototype. 100% free.
I used to have this dry eye problem a lot, but turning down the brightness of the display really helped with that. The eyes can adapt to very low settings, almost at the bottom of the range on macs at night for example.
I find it is also important that whatever is behind the screen is lit indirectly equally to the brightness of the display. A bright screen in front of a dark wall is a perfect recipe for dry eyes for me.
Optometrist recommended I take daily fish oil and give it a month to see result. Sure enough, roughly a month later, I stopped having dry eyes. My eyes feel good even now during winter, when both outside and inside air is quite dry.
I, too, experienced dry eyes and found it challenging to consciously blink regularly. A few years ago, someone gifted me one of these "3-D puzzles" (similar to this: https://www.amazon.ca/Bookend-Miniature-Bookshelf-Birthday-B...). I kept it on my desk and it helped me somewhat regulate my constant focus on the screen by prompting me to glance at it occasionally. That's just something that worked for me.
This is a great idea, and it seems surprisingly accurate.
I know it's a prototype, but in case you're interested in feature requests: if I have multiple webcams, it seems to just choose the first one without a way to select another.
> Could an external stimulus trigger a subconscious blink?
you could set something up where a water gun squirts you on a random interval between 2-5 minutes. heh i think i would kill someone if they did that to me.
I'm not aware of any triggers to cause subconscious blinking. That'd be fantastic if there was an option though.
The web app can trigger a notification if your blinks / minute drop too low. Only challenge is modern browsers throttle websites that aren't visible, so the blink counting gets messed up.
I once used shop lights aimed at my ceiling to get through a winter, while avoiding depression. Four pairs on stands around the room, behind the furniture aimed at a vaulted ceiling.
It worked very well. Every day felt like summer.
I quickly learned to turn off the sun and go back to regular lighting around 5pm.
In my next house, where I am now, I have large cove molding rectangles with recessed bands of LED lighting, all bouncing off the ceiling.
It’s great, because it’s really bright, but so even. Like a good day outside. You feel very awake, alert, & energized, but it is very relaxing too.
They dim, but perhaps for the same reasons as the article mentioned, that isn’t always as relaxing. So I have different accent lighting & lamps in each room to create different evening moods.
For working at home, for many years, the combination has been great.
I did the same thing and it was good for a long time, then one day I came in to find the maintenance people replacing it - thinking it was broken - instead of just twisting it back. I guess they weren't too bright (lol).
Could be worse. I worked in an old building in London which I think used to be a warehouse. It was renovated but the lighting was very low and they said they couldn't install stronger diffused lighting because of the local code. They eventually added hanging spotlights. Very bright and very narrow. But they would always end up shining right into someone's eyes. Every once in a while someone got annoyed by one and would rotate it in some other direction, only to piss someone else off.
My eyes are sensitive to glare, so in my last job I took to wearing the visor I wore outside also inside. Got some weird looks but it was a lot easier on my eyes.
I have a friend who setup lighting in there garage where he works on servers, he was really proud of his new lights, when I came in, I was shocked to see he picked the worst lights possible, blinding blue/white, flickering, shining directly into your face.
I don't know how he does it, but I can't stand it.
Also, at work we have fluorescent tubes, it's so bad. Sometimes when I work weekends (by my self), I'll leave them off when I get in, just use natural light. It's so much nicer. Also helps that the building "A/C" is off too. I quote it because it's a sad excuse for A/C which barely cools, just makes a huge amount of noise for doing nothing.
I forgot just how bad it got until they did a big office move a couple of months ago. Previous to that I'd been way out on the edge with large windows behind me (with some shading film on them). My move now put me in the centre of the floor with barely a window in visible range, stuck under these godawful, far too bright lights.
The first day in that space reminded me just how much I'd hated that aspect of things before the pandemic.
The natural light and diffuse light are good tips.
Next is to get a big screen eg. 85" 4K and put it 1.5m away. That should be your main display. I don't have that all the time, but then I get some variety, 85" @ 1.5m a lot of the time, laptop some of the time, driving/walking etc. for longer range.
1.5m is the midpoint of focus for the muscles in your eyes.
I built augmented reality displays and this was the focal plane we selected for to minimize eye strain and the felt sense of vergence/accommodation conflict.
We could then throw graphics as close as ~30cm, or at infinity using vergence adjustments, even though the accommodation was at a fixed 1.5m. Graphics felt best at that distance, but they also felt ok in the range 0.5-10m, which suited nearly all productivity scenarios.
> do you not get sore having to dart your eyes about to read the corners?
I wouldn't be surprised if this is what makes it healthier. Not only are you exercising your eyes, you're also giving them a chance to let you know when they need a break.
I do almost exactly this, but instead use a cheapish 65" 4k/60hz TV instead. I can see bits of my surroundings with my peripheral vision, but only with the parts of my vision that are already blurry.
I suspect that 85" was chosen to maximize immersion for gamers (cover the entire field of view), rather than to minimize eyestrain. For me doing development work on a 65" from about 1.5m is close to ideal.
I would disagree with 1.5m, but I do recommend checking how close you are to your monitor.
Let's assume you have a reasonably sized office monitor (27" or so). Extend your arm with your hand as a fist, forward. If your screen is closer to you than your knuckles, it's too close.
Now, for the height: all monitor stands are too low. If you keep your head straight and look at the monitor, you should be looking at the upper third. VESA mounting arms or monitor stands solve this problem.
I struggled for years to find a lighting set up for my work from home environment. I eventually realized that it was the quality of light not necessarily the quantity of light I needed to address.
On a whim, I purchased two of those plant grow lamps with full spectrum, lighting, and pointed them upwards perched on a tall pedestal reflecting off of the ceiling.
This has worked far better than any other lighting strategy I’ve ever tried and seems to have mostly solved my seasonal affectedness disorder. It has been 0° and windy outside lately with no sun and I’m doing fine.
Glad to hear someone else doing this. I feel bad not using the grow light to... you know... grow plants. But the light it provides in my office is lovely.
Monitor brightness down, ambient light up. Monitors are promoted as having crazy brightness, but this is exactly what you don't want for long hours of staring at the screen. You need it as dim as possible without making it hard to see. I run mine at 20% of the factory default.
And of course turn the lights on and/or open a window. No more cave coding.
My other suggestion is sunglasses for every moment you spend in sunlight. This makes a huge difference.
The bottom line is to simply quit making your eyes adjust to extreme swings in brightness.
Many people overlook how spaces are lit from an aesthetic perspective as well as a from the functional perspective this article is written from. Lamps and other eye-level lighting sources do more than just help eye strain as the article suggests; they also work wonders from an interior design perspective, and make spaces feel way more livable. I always find homes overly reliant on overhead lighting struggle to shake the more sterile feel of offices, where overhead dominates.
Readit News
* Use diffuse light. This usually means multiple light sources bouncing and diffusing light off surfaces (ceilings, walls, etc) or diffusers.
* Minimize shadows. Shadows lead to contrast which can lead to eye strain. Use multiple, maybe directional, light sources to illuminate shadows.
* Minimize highlights. Windows without blinds let in lots of light which leads to contrast and can lead to eye strain. Curtains and blinds are great ways to diffuse light.
* Uniform color temperature. Try to make sure all your lights have the same color temperature. Small variations are okay but large color temperature variations lead to color contrast which also tends to be hard on eye strain.
* Select your color temperature based on needs and feeling. A lot of people prefer warmer color temperature lights and cool temperature lights are known to be more stressful for folks with anxiety-related conditions, but if your work requires accurate color representation, or you find yourself mentally trying to compensate for color temperature, then change the temperature to what you find most productive yet relaxing.
* Wall color. Remember that "white" light that reflects off colored surfaces will take on a hue similar to the reflected surfaces. Walls of different colors can cause challenges for uniform color temperature, and warm colored walls can take cold lights and turn them warm.
A side effect, of course, is that your room will become a lot more photogenic. It's no coincidence since photogenic rooms are often just easiest on the eye to look at.
"Golden Hour" is considered a great time for photogenic events, photographs, and videos. "Golden Hour" lighting tends to be diffuse, not too strong, and warm toned. Humans tend to really like this style of lighting and if you do too, you might want to recreate some of these properties in your office.
I want to go on a guerrilla campaign around my neighborhood and replace porch light bulbs with warm equivalents.
I cannot overstate how much of a difference it made switching them all to 3000k warm whites. Of course instead of being replaceable bulbs they were all SMDs directly soldered onto little PCBs making it a bit of a project … but so worth it!
I personally buy surplus cinema lighting equipment and use it to light my house. I have a bunch of fancy cinematic LEDs with high CRIs that produce decent light, although they still can't fully compete with tungsten bulbs (e.g. Arrilite series)
Ideally you want to be looking for something with a color temperature in the 3500K (mid-morning) to 6500K (clear blue noon day) range and a CRI of 95+. Also bug manufacturers to start using better color quality metrics like TM-30.
Good on you for fighting the warm light fight!
Go out and buy cheap Christmas lights and expensive ones, and put them up next to each there, and show them that. The difference is staggering. To the point where they look dumb if you hang them up together.
I do find however, that using diffuse lighting and minimizing shadows is what makes lighting feel artificial.
Natural sunlight has very parallel rays that create very evenly lit surfaces with very sharp shadows. Whereas most artificial light has radial rays around the light source that diminish in intensity with the cube of the distance and thus create fading gradients on surfaces and weak shadows especially if you have many of them.
I find I miss the feel of parallel rays of natural light so I try to find lights that have for example, parabolic reflectors to make the rays more parallel and position a few of them farther away from me pointed towards my visual field to try to replicate natural sunlight coming through a window.
One challenge however, is that it's surprisingly difficult to get good parallel rays from artificial light sources because of conservation of etendue ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etendue ). I wish there were more options on the market.
Meanwhile home lighting is well below the 500 lux range, if not even in the 100-200.
I even suspect that the current near-sightedness epidemic is caused by people spending too much time in dim lighting. Maybe if our indoor lighting was brighter our eyesight would not adapt to become near-sighted as much.
I also try to buy lightning fixtures that are designed anti-glare although they are more expensive. You can also make pendant lights yourself with led strips and aluminium profiles.
Your eyesight and glasses also matter a lot. My glasses are quite worn with lots of scratches. They definitely make issues worse.
But I also wonder - why has there been such wide adoption of overhead recessed lighting? To me they’re a big part of why lighting in modern homes looks harsh.
Recessed lighting with parabolic reflectors collimates light conically, which is more similar sunlight than omnidirectional lighting that passes through a diffuser. The sun is basically a point source so far away that the light rays that reach us are almost parallel. To me it feels much “cozier” than soft lighting, which gives everything a bland, washed out look and makes me sleepy during the work day.
I was even thinking about replacing my surface mount LED lighting with recessed cans. But everyone is obviously quite different in their preferences haha. If you want more diffuse lighting, there are filters and lenses they sell that you can slide into the cans.
This is more just a comment written to get folks who are considering lighting to think critically about it for the first time. The average person plops a bright stand lamp in a corner of the room and calls it a day, maybe with a dimmer if they're a bit advanced. The fact that you have an opinion about golden hour lighting means you're already beyond that point :)
You can, of course, make great photos in any light. Golden hour and blue hour are easy because the light is inherently nice.
This is huge. I personally can not stand warm color temperatures in my office or bedroom, I know all the colors are off and it aggravates me to no end. On the other hand, I can't stand cool color temperatures in the dining room because it doesn't lend well to eating comfortably. And in either case, I can't stand warm color temperatures on any monitors/screens or televisions because of the same reason as when I'm in my office or bedroom.
Use color temperatures that suit your preferences, going against them just because someone says it's better for you (eg: red shift at night, aka blue light fearmongering) is patented bullshit.
Our eye lids have glands in them that release oils on your eye with each blink. These oils help prevent the watery part of your tears from evaporating. When it evaporates your eyes dry out causing discomfort and potentially pain.
If you don't blink enough, the oil doesnt get on your eyes and eventually, in extreme cases, the glands can even die. A lack of oil in tears can cause extreme eye fatigue and even pain.
This is why dry eyes is on the rise. Remember to blink!
I actually built a little web app to count my blinks. See https://dryeyestuff.com/. Not perfect, just a prototype. 100% free.
I find it is also important that whatever is behind the screen is lit indirectly equally to the brightness of the display. A bright screen in front of a dark wall is a perfect recipe for dry eyes for me.
A laptop + big monitor is less irritating for the eyes as long as they aren't put exactly on the same line.
I know it's a prototype, but in case you're interested in feature requests: if I have multiple webcams, it seems to just choose the first one without a way to select another.
you could set something up where a water gun squirts you on a random interval between 2-5 minutes. heh i think i would kill someone if they did that to me.
The web app can trigger a notification if your blinks / minute drop too low. Only challenge is modern browsers throttle websites that aren't visible, so the blink counting gets messed up.
It worked very well. Every day felt like summer.
I quickly learned to turn off the sun and go back to regular lighting around 5pm.
In my next house, where I am now, I have large cove molding rectangles with recessed bands of LED lighting, all bouncing off the ceiling.
It’s great, because it’s really bright, but so even. Like a good day outside. You feel very awake, alert, & energized, but it is very relaxing too.
They dim, but perhaps for the same reasons as the article mentioned, that isn’t always as relaxing. So I have different accent lighting & lamps in each room to create different evening moods.
For working at home, for many years, the combination has been great.
It helped a lot until maintenance would come in at night and "fix" the light and I'd have to do it all over.
I don't know how he does it, but I can't stand it.
Also, at work we have fluorescent tubes, it's so bad. Sometimes when I work weekends (by my self), I'll leave them off when I get in, just use natural light. It's so much nicer. Also helps that the building "A/C" is off too. I quote it because it's a sad excuse for A/C which barely cools, just makes a huge amount of noise for doing nothing.
I forgot just how bad it got until they did a big office move a couple of months ago. Previous to that I'd been way out on the edge with large windows behind me (with some shading film on them). My move now put me in the centre of the floor with barely a window in visible range, stuck under these godawful, far too bright lights.
The first day in that space reminded me just how much I'd hated that aspect of things before the pandemic.
Next is to get a big screen eg. 85" 4K and put it 1.5m away. That should be your main display. I don't have that all the time, but then I get some variety, 85" @ 1.5m a lot of the time, laptop some of the time, driving/walking etc. for longer range.
1.5m is the midpoint of focus for the muscles in your eyes.
I built augmented reality displays and this was the focal plane we selected for to minimize eye strain and the felt sense of vergence/accommodation conflict.
We could then throw graphics as close as ~30cm, or at infinity using vergence adjustments, even though the accommodation was at a fixed 1.5m. Graphics felt best at that distance, but they also felt ok in the range 0.5-10m, which suited nearly all productivity scenarios.
I wouldn't be surprised if this is what makes it healthier. Not only are you exercising your eyes, you're also giving them a chance to let you know when they need a break.
I suspect that 85" was chosen to maximize immersion for gamers (cover the entire field of view), rather than to minimize eyestrain. For me doing development work on a 65" from about 1.5m is close to ideal.
Let's assume you have a reasonably sized office monitor (27" or so). Extend your arm with your hand as a fist, forward. If your screen is closer to you than your knuckles, it's too close.
Now, for the height: all monitor stands are too low. If you keep your head straight and look at the monitor, you should be looking at the upper third. VESA mounting arms or monitor stands solve this problem.
Either way we're on the same lines - too many people are looking up too much when looking at the monitor. It takes more effort than looking down.
On a whim, I purchased two of those plant grow lamps with full spectrum, lighting, and pointed them upwards perched on a tall pedestal reflecting off of the ceiling.
This has worked far better than any other lighting strategy I’ve ever tried and seems to have mostly solved my seasonal affectedness disorder. It has been 0° and windy outside lately with no sun and I’m doing fine.
I am in fact a plant.
And of course turn the lights on and/or open a window. No more cave coding.
My other suggestion is sunglasses for every moment you spend in sunlight. This makes a huge difference.
The bottom line is to simply quit making your eyes adjust to extreme swings in brightness.