This is also known as “brightness” or “light output.” Your reference point: A standard 100-watt incandescent light bulb produces about 1,500 – 1,700 lumens. I would highly recommend reading high quality flashlight reviews such as 1Lumen, ZeroAir, and of course this website! Unless it is a new light and not reviewed yet, I would personally avoid any lights with no independent reviews.A measurement of light emitted by a source, whether it’s LED, Fluorescent, Halogen, or Incandescent. I try to include this information in my flashlight/torch buying guide for light painting photographers. These include a range of well spaced brightness levels, constant frequency strobes, last mode memory for any brightness level and strobe, and accessible switches. There are plenty of torch/flashlight features that need to be considered for light painting which in many cases are far more important than maximum lumens. There are multiple other factor that may affect how many of those lumens actually end up in the light painting tool. 1,200 lumens, and even that is overkill for most scenes.

The vast majority of light painting photography scenes do not require more than approx. Maximum lumens may be a selling point for flashlights, but you may also need to be aware of how long the flashlight will last at maximum brightness, and maximum sustained brightness. Impartial reviews with lux measurements I have found useful are New Layer YouTube and Website, and Tech Notice. Unlike flashlights, where there are a many reputable reviewers, decent reviewers of LED panel lights are far and few between. Even RGB emitter brightness can be all over the place - for example one product may have a brighter blue, another might have a brighter red. Another thing to consider is that lux claims are usually for white light output (most likely with warm and cool white emitters all on) and not for the colour RGB emitters. The former light will be 4 times brighter! There are also a lot of dubious lux claims by some LED panel lights. So one manufacturer may claim 1,500 lux at 1m, another manufacturer may claim 1,500 lux at 50cm. Unfortunately, lux is stated at a distance from the light source, and that distance isn't fixed. For more floody video lights and LED panels, lux is a more commonly used measurement. It isn't just lumens where manufacturers are less than honest. If you use strobe mode, take note of the strobe mode's brightness, it isn't always at maximum output (notably on lights with Anduril UI). In fact one of my best lights for illuminating longer tools is just 750 lumens (Convoy S2+ CSLNM1.TG)! It seems that the candela sweet spot for use with longer light painting tools is around 15 to 30Kcd irrespective of the lumens. Due to the difference in lumens vs peak beam intensity, it is actually possible for a throwy light with less lumens to be better at illuminating longer light painting tools than floody light with more lumens. This will be much better at illuminating long narrow tools such as light sabers, swords, rods, and tubes. If you have a 'throwy' light, then for the same lumens, it will have a higher peak beam intensity. This may be great for illumination purposes, but generally not so good for use with light painting tools (maybe fiber optic brushes).

A 'floody' light will spread out that light, and have low peak beam intensity. Peak beam intensity is affected by lumens, LED size/type, reflector/optics design. Peak beam intensity is the brightness of the centre of the beam, and thus can be represented in candela, or throw (in metres). However, it doesn't always create a useful picture of how useful that light is. Lumens is the measurement of total luminous flux.

3000 lumen lights