Color temperature mired converter

Lighting designers, photographers and camera engineers constantly move between Kelvin color temperature and the mired scale used for filter packs and white-balance deltas. This color temperature mired converter turns a positive value in kelvin, mired, reciprocal megakelvin or decamired into every other supported unit with the textbook identity mired equals one million divided by Kelvin. Reciprocal megakelvin is numerically identical to mired, and one decamired is ten mireds—the step size printed on many gel and dichroic filter sets.

Kelvin, mired, MK⁻¹ and decamired explained

Color temperature in kelvin describes the approximate blackbody appearance of a light source: candlelight near one thousand eight hundred K, tungsten studio lamps near three thousand two hundred K, daylight-balanced strobes near five thousand six hundred K, and overcast or electronic flash often higher still. The mired scale—short for micro reciprocal degree—is defined exactly as one million divided by that Kelvin temperature.

Because the mapping is reciprocal rather than linear, equal mired steps correspond to roughly equal perceived color shifts, which is why filter manufacturers rate correction gels in mireds or decamireds instead of raw Kelvin. Reciprocal megakelvin, written MK⁻¹, is the SI-style name for the same quantity: one mired equals one reciprocal megakelvin, so converting between those two labels never changes the number. A decamired is ten mireds and is the coarser step used on many color-correction filter charts and cinema gel swatch books.

Enter any positive reading in one of these four units and the converter returns the equivalent values in all of them, so you can annotate a shot list in Kelvin while ordering gels by mired shift or decamired steps without juggling a hand calculator.

Exact conversion formulas and validation rules

Every conversion routes through Kelvin as the hub so stacked unit hops never accumulate formula error. From kelvin, mired equals one million divided by T and reciprocal megakelvin receives the same number; decamired equals mired divided by ten, which is one hundred thousand divided by T. From mired or reciprocal megakelvin, Kelvin is one million divided by the mired value.

From decamired, Kelvin is one hundred thousand divided by the decamired value. All factors are exact powers of ten—there is no fitted curve, no Planckian locus approximation, and no temperature-to-RGB path (that is a separate capability). The value field must be a finite positive number: zero and negatives are rejected because they do not define a usable color temperature under the reciprocal definition.

How lighting and camera teams use it

Call the capability with three fields: value as a finite positive number, from as the source unit, and to as the target unit. A formula string restates the identities for documentation sidebars. The browser path runs the identical pure module free of charge, which is ideal for quick set checks and classroom demos.

Photographers use it to turn a 5600 K daylight reading into about 178.57 mired before computing a filter shift; gaffers convert a 3200 K tungsten plate into mireds and subtract to size CTO or CTB packs in decamired steps; firmware and camera-app authors keep white-balance UI in Kelvin while logging MK⁻¹ deltas against a reference. Status is beta while the public surface stabilizes, but the arithmetic itself is fixed textbook identity and will not change under the same inputs.