How to make tank blue like LFS

[Miami Reef]

I have the Ai hydra 52’s non HD’s but I can’t seem to match the lights to get that crisp deep blue that my lfs has, no matter what I do. My lights settings are Blues and violets to 100% Red, green 25%, UV 75% and whites at 15%. It looks blue, but the colors of the corals don’t “pop” the way they do at the LFS.

My corals:

Image I found on google. More of less what their corals look like.

Do I bring my whites to 0%?

 

[mcarroll]

I hate to break it to you...but pictures lie...and lights don't give corals their color – lots more goes into it.

For one thing you didn't mention which lights you're trying to emulate....if they are the same lights you have, just ask for their settings. :)

If they are NOT the same lights, just give up and form your own opinion on your coral and your lights. They simply look different in your tank. :)

If they are the same lights and you can match settings, then you still have the issues of flow, water chemistry, food and nutrients to deal with. (Just to name the biggies that folks go wrong with all the time.)

Definitely give up using pictures as any kind of reference.

Here are two from my Internet Reefer's Decoder Ring series...
“Pop”
“DSLR Camera”

 

[mcarroll]

(updated my post)

 

[HomeSlizzice]

I don't know how deep your tank is so depending on how deep it is I'd use either 50%, 75%, 100% etc.... but your ratio seems odd to me.

I would try the following for 100%:
Blues & Violets at 100%
Red & Green at 16%
White at 24%

In my tank I run my LED's at 75% output so it looks like this:
Blues & Violets at 75%
Red & Green at 12%
White at 18%

 

[Ron Reefman]

I can't say that I have ever seen an LFS or a vendor at a show with any whites on in their led fixtures... or reds or greens either! And the reds and greens just serve to tint the blue toward colors other than blue.

My fixture has a setting called 'manual' and for me it's a setting I can switch to any time somebody is at my house and I want them to see the fluorescence that I see in the morning and evening. I run both blue channels at 100% and the violet at 50%, no white, red or green at all. My tank looks like Pandora at night (think the movie Avatar).

BTW, never trust what you see in photos! It's so easy to bump up color and intensity with even simple use of photo software, let alone what you can do with Photoshop or any other high end software!

 

[jda]

They have corals that obtained those colors under different lights. You have do two things... first, actually render good color in the coral and second, illuminate them. Not many lights can do both at the same time. A LFS has the ability to get coral from the ocean with well-rendered color and then just show them off... the color can fade over time depending on the species. The bottom line is that you need all parts of daylight for best color rendition, but just having some blues for illumination can give the "blacklight look." Just illuminating with blue all of the time will not produce as colorful of corals most of the time (depending on the kind).

All of this being said, those Z&P that they have are more colorful than the ones that you have, even though this picture is oversaturated.