Color correct lens or lights?

Chamber005

Chamber005

Carbonite Member
So I was wondering if there was any difference between putting a color correcting lens over your digital camera and using color correcting gels on windows or lights.

Im going to be shooting interiors, days only, using Home Depot halogens, so there's going to be a mix of sunlight and artificial in every scene.

I'd just assume color correct everything for daylight, but I'm not clear what the best route to go is. If I gel the lights it will mean building some kind of stationary system that I can place in front of each light (far enough away so that it won't melt the gel). I was already going to put something like that together to diffuse them -- so I guess I could hang the gel and the diffusion material on the same piece.

But it seems like it would be so much easier to just put a color correcting lens on the camera, just in case I wanted to throw on an overhead light or something in a pinch.

Any ideas?

And have any of you ever used a tinted frosted shower curtain as a kind of diffuser + minor color correction? Just wondering if that would work -- like, I know the gels are an exact science, but would the results be similar if you had a froested shower curtain that was pretty close to the blue gel's hue?
 
Color correcting in camera fixes overall tone of the scene. Color correcting lights is for mixing lights of different originating color temperatures, like sunlight and halogens.
 
Cassius said:
Color correcting in camera fixes overall tone of the scene. Color correcting lights is for mixing lights of different originating color temperatures, like sunlight and halogens.
Click to expand...


But if you color corrected the lens for, say daylight, wouldn't that color correct everything. Daylight would stay daylight and the halogens would then be corrected as daylight as well.
 
If your daylight is 5600k and your halogens are 3600k, you need to add 2000k to your halogens. If you put it on your lens the halogens go to 5600k, but your 5600k is now 7600k. Which didn't help you at all. There are other things to consider sometimes, but that's the basic idea.

Keep in mind it's all relative.
 
Cassius said:
If your daylight is 5600k and your halogens are 3600k, you need to add 2000k to your halogens. If you put it on your lens the halogens go to 5600k, but your 5600k is now 7600k. Which didn't help you at all. There are other things to consider sometimes, but that's the basic idea.

Keep in mind it's all relative.
Click to expand...


Whooooa. That's not how I understood it at all. I thought the gels matched the temperature of daylight period. It doesn't matter what light source you put it in front of, if you gel a 1500K or 3600K they will both equal 5600K, and if you gel 5600K with a daylight gel you would just end up with 5600K. I didn't think the gels themselves had equatiive properties so much as they worked as filters that change whatever is going through it into a certain temp -- even if the temps are identical.
 
Using CTB or CTO is a plus or minus equation. For example, if you white balance your camera for 5600K daylight and are using 3200k tungsten lights you need a FULL CTB to adjust the color temp in the tungsten fixtures to match daylight.

If you white balance to 3200k tungstens, all white that is hit by the 3200k fixtures will appear as white. Any external sunlight in shot will shift to the blue end of the scale - around 7800k (depending on time of day).

The best way to white balance a room that has external sunlight is to use this method - watch the time of day as this will effect the color temp of the sunlight coming through. There is no camera filter than can be placed on the lens that will balance everything to 5600k. And even if there were it would only adjust colors from their original form and your white balance does that anyway.

Id be very careful using a blue colored material. First, whilst it would go someway to balancing a tungsten light to daylight, it would be off. Second, gels are made to withstand certain levels of heat. You would really have to watch the distance to light. Bit dangerous IMO.
 
Yeah, after looking at the different options, I'm just going to go with the cam's balancing act. It has a Tungsten mode that balances the halogens to daylight. It leaves the light coming from the windows to be quite blue, but maybe I can just get creative -- leaving more windows with the shades drawn when it would be a daylight/Tungsten scene, and using reflectors and stuff when the actor is by an open window.

It's either that or I could gel the windows -- but I'd hate to lose natural daylight as a lighting option so I'll probably just go the more "creative" shooting route.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top