Ask away Questions 6

The final chapter for now in the “ask Frank” series. More can follow but I think I answered everything from the original blog post by now.

Question :
Next to the excelent question about the skin tones I also like to know how to use gels for effect lighting. Ok I know to put them in front of the light but a lot of times the color does not pop up. I wonder what the cause is. Someone told me you have to lower the power but is that true? Is there more to it? What colors work the best?

Answer :
Using colored gels can really enhance an image. I try not to overdo it like you see in some cases where every image has some sort of colored gel… and don’t get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with that of course, but it’s just not my thing (at the moment, that can always change of course).

Now to get that POP you have to realize that colors work with saturation.
One gel of red can give you different kind of looks, when you pop the strobe on full power the red will probably be a little weak and overthrow the other lights, however when you lower the output the red will get more and more saturated, looking deeper and more red. You can check this by using a black background and shooting a colored gel to that background, now first shoot it on f8, than on f11, than on f16 or go lower… you will see that the intensity of the color changes making it more saturated or less saturated.

Now how to meter this…
Well that’s incredibly difficult. If you use the strobe as a main light lighting your model you will probably choose for an accurate incident meter reading, but I wonder why you would want to do that?… often the colored gels are used as accent lights or on the background and in that case it’s all about the “saturation” you want in that color, and this you control with the brightness of the strobe. And before the experts say that this is wrong… let me quickly explain how the color system works… and this is really a QUICK explanation.

In a 3 dimensional colorspace you have 3 coordinates for your color labeled x,y,Y
These are controlled by Saturation (moving away from the balanced white point), Hue (moving towards the secondaries (in the case of Red this means towards Yellow and Magenta), and Brightness (the big Y), brightness is always a tricky one to explain because in a 2D rendering of the colorspace you won’t see any changes…. well that’s true but we have to think 3D. When we balance on a white we will get a reading for the Y for white, and all the other colors are rendered towards that Y value of white, meaning that the Y of Red, Green, Blue, Cyan, Magenta and Yellow have to be in “balance”. This is when calibrating towards a set colorspace by the way, or to make it easier this is what goes in inside your color analyzer when you calibrate your monitor 😀

But back to our story (hope I still got your attention).
In photography (studio or location) we control the LOOK/Saturation of the color by changing the output (brightness) of the strobe.

Now that we got this out of the way, how do you make sure that your strobe doesn’t blow out when including the strobe in the image…. well you don’t, unless you want your model to not be hit by the color it will always blow out because you’re shooting straight into the light source. What you COULD do, but that looks incredibly fake is use two strobes, one where you use just enough light to light up the color of the gel but not blow it out (maybe only use modeling lights) and one strobe out of the picture that gives you the color itself…. but to be honest again it looks fake.

Adding a touch of smoke can really enhance the image by the way.
But also with a more glamours setting it can enhance the image.

What I would advise is it make sure that there is no “non colored” strobe hitting the same spot as the colored gel, that can really destroy the look you’re after.

Hope this helps.