Welcome to the live series we’re doing every two weeks on Profoto’s Instagram called “Slice of Pye”. We’ll be covering a myriad of topics, discussing lighting principles, and showcasing a ton of Profoto gear in action over the course of the next year so please join us over on IG Live!
Tune in to our next episode: December 4th at 2PM PST!
In this episode, we’ll show you our 3 favorite colored gels to create creative ambient light color shifts in your images. Watch the full episode below:
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Special thanks to Gabrielle our model for helping us out in this episode, you can follow her on Instagram here. In case you missed our last episode, you can watch them all on the Profoto IGTV channel! Let’s dive into why these are our favorite 3 gels.
1. Blue Gel (CTB)
When you have mastered the technical parts of exposure and color correct photography, then you can move on to the artistic side of lighting. When you learn how to use Gels and Color Temperature for creative effects, you can shoot beautiful and stunning imagery that wouldn’t have been possible before. By warming up my in-camera white balance to 8,000-10,000K. In order to balance the color in the scene and ensure that their skin tones aren’t too orange, I pulled out a color temperature blue gel.
2. Orange Gel (CTO)
On the complete opposite of blue on the color spectrum is orange which means that when we use a color temperature orange gel, we’ll need to adjust our in-camera white balance to 2900-3500K. For this shot, I was at around 3200K using a Full CTO Gel. You can accomplish something similar if you wanted less blue but remember to use a 1/2 CTO Gel in order to balance out the white balance with the color of the gel.
3. Green Gel (CTG)
Similar to the reasoning above, if you look at the opposite of magenta or pink on a color wheel you’ll find that green is on the opposite side of that. I popped in the Green gel and shifted my in-camera tint to magenta to make the skies a bit pinker in color. While it is common to alter white balance in-camera, not many think to touch the tint shift settings.
We hope you enjoyed this episode of Slice of Pye, please feel free to share or re-watch the IGTV video at any time to reference the material we covered! For more tutorials and lessons on the fundamentals of lighting, check out our Flash Photography Training System!
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