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Background In recent years, the popularity of LED lighting has rapidly increased, owing to its many advantages, including economic benefits. We examined the change in the quality of drugs during storage under LED and fluorescent lighting and found that some medicines exhibited a different degree of color change depending on the light source. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of different plastic storage bags on the color change over time when various medicines were stored under LED and fluorescent lighting conditions. Methods Photostability tests were conducted on several types of target drugs. Subsequently, subjective evaluation by ten evaluators and objective evaluation by image analysis software were carried out regarding color change. Results A similar change in color tone was observed after all types of illumination. Subjective evaluation by 10 evaluators revealed that “change in color tone” occurred in the order of bulb-color LED lighting < daylight-color LED lighting < fluorescent lighting, regardless of the type of plastic bags. A similar tendency was observed also in objective evaluation. In this study, it was considered that a brown light-shielding plastic bag was more effective than a normal plastic bag for the prevention of the color change of medicines stored under LED lighting. Conclusions The above results suggested that the most appropriate combination of plastic bag and light source for medicine storage was a brown light-shielding plastic bag and bulb-color LED lighting. Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article (10.1186/s40780-018-0108-0) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.