Lighting Techniques: The Short List

Lighting designers and engineers take advantage of a number of techniques and tricks to make illumination design work:

• Backlighting: The diffusing of light through translucent materials such as fabric, stained glass or acrylic panels.

• Beam play: Shapes of light on walls or floors. Light beams and shadows can be used to enliven a bland space like a corridor.

• Downlighting: The directing of light at 180 degrees from a fixture aperture. The method is used for uniform lighting in overhead task-lighting applications, for example.

• Grazing: Illumination from a low angle of incidence, causing the texture of a vertical surface to pop into view.

• Highlighting: A technique that creates an amount of brightness on a featured object that is about five times that on the background. Low-voltage lamps are used and are very efficient for this technique.

• Shadow play: The reverse of beam play: the pattern of light is the background, while the shape of the shadow carries the visual message. Wide and soft-edged beams are used here.

• Silhouetting: A technique that sandwiches an object between the viewer and a sheet of light. The object will be outlined by the light whose brightness acts as a negative space. Its high contrast focuses attention on the outlined shape of the featured object.

• Sparkle: Where the light source is the object of interest instead of a surface or an object.

• Structural lighting: A method of mounting fixtures on structural members like stairs, cornices and box booms.

• Uplighting: This technique is used when what is up is interesting and should be emphasized.

• Wallwashing: A technique to wash a wall with a sheet of brightness.

Return to “Green Lights for Greenbelt”

Do you have experience and expertise with the topics mentioned in this content? You should consider contributing to our WTWH Media editorial team and getting the recognition you and your company deserve. Click here to start this process.