Gelling Your Lights

This is a simple tip on how you can achieve a better (and more accurate) colors with your images. Mind you, this is for when you are shooting with a speedlight (whether on or off camera) like the Nikon SB-900 or Canon 580EX II or even with studio strobes.

Let's take this down to the most basic situation where you will be using a flash to help convey my message.

So you are shooting a wedding in a normal sized room that is light with incandescent bulbs. These bulbs are giving off a warm, amber color. If we were shooting without a flash then our in-camera white balance should be set to incandescent or a custom Kelvin temp of something like 3200K or something within that range. That is all fine and dandy so shoot away.

But what happens if the room is dimly lit and you need a flash to help light things up? Flashes are daylight balanced around 5400K so what will happen is that the light from the flash will conflict with the ambient light from the incandescent bulbs and you will get various color casts on your subjects or background. Welcome to Photoshop hell at that point!

All we need to do is gel our flashes with the proper CTO filter so we can essentially modify the daylight balanced speedlight and mold it into becoming about the same Kelvin temperature of the ambient light that is around. In the situation above, an amber filter over the speedlight would bring that 5400K speedlight down to the 3200K range. DON'T FORGET TO SET YOUR WHITE BALANCE TO INCANDESCENT AND NOT FLASH!

If your white balance is still off then that is okay because you are at least in the same realm of light without worries of any serious color cast that would be noticeable. This is a very easy fix if you shoot in RAW.

Nikon's SB-900 comes with a couple gels to correct for different lighting conditions. These gels even have some intelligence to them and allows the flash to know which one is mounted. If you are shooting in Auto white balance mode then the flash can tell the camera what filter is over the flash so the camera can take the necessary actions for providing you with a fairly accurate image and color rendition. They even include a real spiffy gel filter holder that snaps on to the flash.

So what is the lesson we learned today boys and girls???

Thanks for stopping by,
Mike