Coin Magnifying Camera

Not all incandescent lamps are halogen, but all halogen lamps are incandescent. They work by making something hot enough to glow. That's the definition of "incandescent".

Filters can do some things, but not everything. They can adjust color balance, but they can't bring up detail that wasn't in the original photo.

 

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I read your post to state you were suggesting that incandescent and halogen were synonymous.

Was in response to "too much blue".

Has not been my experience that blue light inhibits detail or resolution.

But I am certainly no expert.

 

Okay, I'm confused now -- I didn't think anything in the thread was saying blue light was a bad thing.

Halogen bulbs run hotter than conventional incandescents, so they produce more blue light. That's good for capturing color (i.e. toning). If you shoot with a conventional incandescent (or another "warm white" bulb), you can fiddle with color balance (using filters or whatever) to make it look right, but blue detail will suffer. Under the covers, your photo app is amplifying all the blue levels from the original photo to increase their intensity, and that also amplifies the noise in that channel.

As an aside, I wish we didn't use "cool white" to refer to higher color temperature and "warm white" to refer to lower color temperature. I guess we made that choice when "cool white" was diffuse light from the (cold) sky, and "warm white" was light from, well, fire.