Dear Dr. Troscianko and collaborators,
First of all, thank you for creating the MICA and the QCPA! The prospect of being able to use UV-Visible pictures to analyze animal coloration is exciting.
I would like to use the MICA to analyze some UV-Visible pictures that we took in the lab some time ago with a UV-Visible lamp that we had at disposition at that moment: the OSRAM Ultravitalux Lamp spectrum and details.
I read the guidelines here on the website about illuminant spectra and I fear that the OSRAM spikey peaks will complicate the analysis as one of the symptoms of those peaks, the unnatural color, is clearly showing in our pictures (raws show a strong green bias).
I plan to ask Dr. Savazzi for the spectrum of the lamp and use that to calibrate the pictures, however I was wondering if there are any further steps I could take to model this illuminant in the MICA environment.
I thank you in advance for your attention! Best regards,
Nicola Rossi
I’m really sorry I missed this question earlier! Actually I don’t think those peaks look too problematic. There are nice continuous emissions between the peaks, and the peaks are quite close together (a typical receptor will cover many peaks). I wouldn’t worry at all about this light source in terms of creating a decent cone-catch model. Just check the R^2 values it shows, and if these are low (e.g. <~0.97) then metamerism from the light source might be problematic.
The spectrum is all you need for creating the model.
Cheers,
Jolyon