By adding a green gel to your flash, the flash will no longer look magenta, but neutral, as the fluorescent white balance setting neutralizes the green color. See how it appears a blueish colour, even though you may have noticed the background is actually grey in real life? So if we’re only using one light, you’re probably assuming that we need a specialist lighting modifier, right? It is a good idea to purchase high-quality, heat-resistant gels made for cinema lights or avoid using modeling lamps unless they are LED lights with proper cooling. The only real difference between them is that the CTO has a bit more red, and CTS has a bit more yellow.

8 Awesome Lighting Setups Using Gels For Creativity 8 Awesome Lighting Setups Using Gels For Creativity

But whenever we use a VERY hard light source like an optical snoot we need to be extremely careful with where we place it due to those unflattering shadows. One piece of advice I will offer, is that when choosing gels to tape together, be sure to consider the gel density of the two gels you’re using.Using the same colors but a different lightning we can have a soft render, here the cyan reflects on a white wall and a reflector is added under the model. Of course, when the camera adds blue to the shot to counteract the orange on the model, everything else in the shot also goes more blue, including the background. I wasn’t sure whether to include this or not, but seeing as I shot it, I thought I’d share the images here and if any of you find it interesting or useful, then this is a clever little technique to play with.

Balancing Color for Flash and Ambient Light using Gels

If you're shooting under fluorescent lighting, for example, you'd set your camera to use a fluorescent white balance. There are three commonly used color correction gels: CTB Color Temperature Blue isn't that useful for color correction with flash, but can be used over a tungsten light to bring it to a similar color temperature to daylight. In addition to her photography, Dunja also expresses her creativity through writing, embroidery, and jewelry making. Some of you may not have encountered CTO (colour temperature orange) gels before so I’ll briefly explain what they do. If your primary light source is of daylight temperature and you need to add or mimic the source of tungsten lighting, you would need to add a CTO gel to the light source.Almost every color manufacturer today uses either polycarbonate or polyester to manufacture their gels. Without filtering, one must attempt to fix white balance through color timing or by manipulating the film after it has been scanned or telecined. Color correction is a technical process that fixes color issues and makes footage appear as naturalistic as possible. Midday sunlight lands at around 5000-5600k, so you would need to correct your tungsten light source. We would love it if you do use our affiliate links here so we can continue to keep writing awesome articles that you can trust.