Lighting
Lighting Gels (page 2)

Always place your gel in a gel frame. Do not place gels directly on the face of the lighting instrument. Although gels are made of heat-resistant plastic, they do melt, and you will have a mess on your hands if there is not a small space between the gel and the light to let the heat escape. Most lighting instruments have specially-designed gel frames that clip or frame the gel. Place the gel in the frame, and make sure that there is very little or no spill light sneaking around the edges. Remember, even a little bit of white light will desaturate your color and turn your deep reds into washed-out pinks!

When setting up your background lights with colored gels, think about what you are trying to accomplish. Light, just like set pieces and movement, looks better if it is slanting diagonally across the picture - not straight across. Use barn doors to create a slash of blue and a slash of red during your political rallies. Throw a deep color across background pieces, giving them more depth and detail. Use your imagination. If you need depth in the frame, adding deep color to the background will provide interest and give your background a three-dimensional feel, especially when the color wraps around objects. Always remember to flag any white light from falling on the areas that are being lit by colored gels. Otherwise, the colors will become desaturated.

We all know that, when a camera sees white as white, the rest of the colors in your shot should be correct. However, what if you are using colored gels? Remember, if you are using a blue gel to create bluer light, you actually want to see it as blue. If you white-balance under the blue light, the camera will think it is white light, and it will turn everything orange. When using colored gels, always make sure you are white-balancing with the white light that you are using to light your talent. If you want to light your talent in blue light, to look as if they are walking through moonlight, then you must remove the gel, white-balance and then replace the gel.

While there are more than 30 color-correction gels you can use to change the color temperature of a light source, they all fall into four major groups: CTO, CTS, CTB or Plus or Minus Green.

CTO, or color temperature orange, is a gel that you can place over windows to convert outdoor 5600K light to indoor or 3200K light. In other words, it strips the blue out of the outdoor light so that it will match the color of the indoor light.

CTS stands for color-temperature straw. This gel has the same function as CTO, except that it is more yellow and less red. This provides a little cooler color for outdoor light.

CTB, or color temperature blue, converts 3200K indoor lighting to match the 5600K light coming through the windows. This is a very effective gel that enables you to use outdoor light as your base light, while you use a 3200K instrument gelled with CTB as your key light.

Finally, Plus and Minus Green gels are used to color-correct fluorescent lights. The Minus Green gels are magenta in color. They strip the green out of the fluorescent light and match it to indoor or 3200K light. If you find that you are spending a lot of time shooting in offices with fluorescent tubes, you may want to buy tubes of Minus Green that fit over the fluorescent fixtures.

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