The standard filament bulb is
1- producing a lot of light (because it is using 25w electricity however inefficient)
2 - The light is not pure white but biased to the red end of the spectrum.
If you put it through a red filter you will get a lot of red light out.
If you had identical LEDs - same brightness (Candella Cd) and angle of beam etc. one red and one white. If you shone both through a red filter then the red LED will be brighter. The filter will be effectivly invisible to it where a lot of the light from the white LED will be stopped.
Where it starts getting vague is the colour of the LED and the lens should be a pretty good match, fairly easy with red but "amber" can be yellow to orange. (Amber should be about 590nm if you are an anorak)
The second problem is that the maximum 5mm red LED brightness is around 15,000mcd
The brightest 5mm white LED is above 40,000mcd, only trial and error would tell you which is most efficient.
My personal choice would be to get lots and lots of fairly high output Red and yellow LEDs.
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