Instagram teems with photos of the lights in New York, and tourists seem to particularly enjoy the vista, whether they are gazing at billboards in Times Square or taking helicopter and boat tours for a bird’s-eye view of skyscrapers, including the iconic Empire State Building.

The building, which is usually lit in its signature white, has embraced some decorative lighting — orange for Halloween, green for Eid al-Fitr, blue and orange for the New York Knicks — since the Bicentennial in 1976, when red, white and blue shone from its top.

Anthony E. Malkin, the chief executive officer of Empire State Realty Trust, which runs the Empire State Building, said the tower’s external lighting system was overhauled in 2011 with energy-efficient LED bulbs and a new control system that can display 16 million color combinations.

Those lights shut off at 2 a.m., Mr. Malkin said, with one exception. “If movie studios are filming New York City, and they’re filming at 2, 3 or 4 a.m.,” he said, “they reach out to us and ask us to leave the lights on.”

The Empire State Building’s internal lights have been mostly retrofit with motion detector sensors, he added. If light is coming from one of its windows, it is likely that someone is inside.