Television Lighting Consistency Index (EBU TLCI-2012 Qa)

The TLCI is an assessment of the colorimetric quality of lighting when used in television production. While similar to the CRI in overall intent and method, it is tailored for Television reproduction by mimicking a complete television camera and display, while using a larger set of test colors (the ColorChecker chart excluding the last row), using a modern color difference metric (CIEDE2000), and weighting the quality metric and overall averaging so as to not dilute the influence of the worst reproduced colors.

A spectral instrument is needed to compute the TLCI, and for the value to be valid, the illuminant must be within a certain tolerance of the black body or Daylight color locus, and the TLCI Readout will annotate the value with (Caution) if this is not the case. If the color is extremely unlike an illuminant, then the TLCI may return Failed. You may decide to use the TLCI values even if they are annotated with (Caution), if you judge the illuminant to be close enough to the illuminant locus to be useful.

The meaning of the resulting Qa can be interpreted using this table:

TLCI Qa
 Quality Scale
 Colorist Opinion
90-100
 Perfect
 Can get all color right
70-95
 Good
 Easy to get most colors right
55-80
 Fair
 Can get some colors right
40-60
 Poor-Fair
 Hard to get much right
25-50
 Poor
 Hard to get anything right.
0-35
 Bad
 Too hard, not worth trying

Index       Quick Start