Color temperature

R

RedChalice

Active member
Im curious if it even matters whether to use daylight balanced lights or tungsten. Once you custom white balance the camera, the image you capture looks the same.

am I missing something?

i have a daylight temp lighht kit. Can this handle all my lighting needs or do i need to have a tungsten kit as well?
 
The image you capture looks the same to you. A lot of people think tungsten provides the best quality light for skin tones (assuming all other factors are equal).

The reason you'd go with one over the other is to match your light fixtures with the colour temperature of a different light source. I.e. if you're using tungsten and there is a lot of daylight spill or you can see outside, it will look blue. While this isn't always a bad thing (http://www.dvxuser.com/V6/showthread.php?328967-Interview-Reel-rip-it-up), this look is often be associated with low budget productions.

It sounds like your current kit can cover all of your needs, even though I don't know what they are.
 
If you are shooting in an existing tungsten environment, such as where there are ceiling fixtures (can lights etc), lamps and other practicals, you will have an easier time if you can work with those fixtures. Otherwise you need to change everything out to match your daylight package, or turn everything off.
 
rob norton said:
The image you capture looks the same to you. A lot of people think tungsten provides the best quality light for skin tones (assuming all other factors are equal).

It sounds like your current kit can cover all of your needs, even though I don't know what they are.
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@RedChalice, just re-read my post and it might've come across as condescending. That wasn't the intent - I'm still learning just like everyone!

I should've said your current light kit will continue to work just fine...for a while I.e. your daylight temp light kit can handle all your current lighting needs but as you develop your skills through experiencing many different lighting scenarios, your standards will change and you'll be tougher to please. This is where a variety of fixtures with different colour temperatures will help to achieve your desired set up, compared to restricting yourself by having just one set of lights. While you're right that after you adjust the WB, an image can look similar, multiple sources with all different temperatures can be jarring or seem out of place.

Of course, having said this I'm sure Charles could give hundreds situations of embracing a mixed-temperature environment!
 
As time goes by, I am encountering fewer and fewer real-life locations that actually use traditional tungsten practical lights. To simplify my life, a few years ago I decided to eliminate all the tungsten lights from my kit and standardized on daylight balanced sources. I have a motley assortment of LED, fluorescent and HMI fixtures now -- moving strongly toward LEDs as I make new purchases. The most common situation I encounter is a room with a mix of fluorescent overheads and daylight streaming through windows, and my daylight sources generally work better for me in these settings than tungsten would, especially in avoiding the blue cast seen through the windows or where the daylight spill can't be entirely eliminated. And even in the worst cases, gelling a daylight source to a tungsten equivalent using CTO doesn't cost as much in terms of light output as trying to go the other way and make a tungsten light look like daylight with CTB. I carry a variety of gels with me and don't hesitate to use them where necessary, but I'm using them less and less as standards in architectural lighting are changing.

High power daylight sources are also useful as fill lights when shooting outdoors.

I very much appreciate the low power consumption and reduced heat from working with higher efficiency lights. Calculating the electrical load, finding enough circuits and outlets, carrying around lots of heavy stingers, dealing with the occasional blown circuit breaker, and waiting for lights to cool down before moving them or vacating a location were all major headaches for me when working with incandescent lights. Granted, there are tungsten-balanced flos and LEDs as well, but many of the bi-color LEDs suffer from an efficiency disadvantage compared to daylight-only types, and I find it just simplifies things to standardize on one color temperature for all my instruments.

Disclaimer: Most of my work is ENG/documentary oriented in an educational setting, so this may not apply fully in the narrative domain, or in older buildings or residences.

- Greg
 
RedChalice said:
Im curious if it even matters whether to use daylight balanced lights or tungsten. Once you custom white balance the camera, the image you capture looks the same.

am I missing something?
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Maybe a little. This was covered in exhaustive depth in posts a few years ago, but basically since tungsten lighting puts out so little blue light, when you custom white balance the camera has to turn up the gain on the blue channel to make up for the lack of blue light. This in turn leads to blue channel noise, and is one of the reasons to move to daylight balanced sources with modern video cameras.

IOW, you're headed in the right direction.
 
These are all solid responses; but… from experience:

Hard, focused daylight is pretty pricey - HMI pars, HMI fresnels, or specialized LED stuff. It's killer to have but if money is tight, a couple fresnels (300, 1k) and some blue gel can give you those looks - and really affordably if you find some used fresnels. (I assume there's a fair amount of getting-started young people on this forum that aren't renting genny trucks and 4k HMIs…)

Roger Deakins often mentions only needing half CTB for a lot of fresnel uses in daylight setups - you don't kill so much light and for hair, rum lighting, etc., often a touch of warmth looks fine and doesn't leap out at you. I've done that many times.

And… the ubiquity and affordability of tungsten + how freaking pretty it can be means that for narrative stuff and even some interview situations that have the time and space - I grab the tungsten. Especially if you're trying to create, say, a warm, interior night time look that's fairly low-key. It's just so damn easy to get that with tungsten without hardly thinking about it, and there's a beauty that's hard to get with daylight stuff.

For night interiors where you want the "blue moonlight" coming in the windows, tungsten rocks because you don't need to blue-gel whatever hard daylight source you're using outside (or gel it as much).

If you frequent Deakins' forum, he shoots loads of tungsten scenes, on the Alexa. He seems to get out the HMIs and Flo's for big daylight setups or where he wants a greenish off-kilter thing (like "No Country for Old Men"'s scenes of Chigurth), but he's still regularly rocking a row of redheads and a fresnel.

Even for business interviews, sometimes I'll get a wild hair and shoot them tungsten. Give them a gorgeous "narrative" look. Sure, you can get that with daylight stuff, but I find tungsten just falls into place so much quicker for those looks. The fact that eBay is often packed with used tungsten stuff makes it easy to get some key pieces over time.

I'm really glad I have both and it's not really an "investment" since I've used the same tungsten rig for like 15 years (used it often in the fashion-stills-film days with tungsten film - nothing's ever looked as gorgeous to me as Ektachrome EPJ. Long gone now. I have 2 rolls in the freezer still…) Damn, the death of film just sucks sometimes!

EPJ - push it three stops and you get candy:

Regan.jpg
 
To add thoughts onto this subject: we are gradually getting to a place where bi-color LED and similar tech are getting good enough, powerful enough and affordable enough to where the "tungsten or daylight" debate will be a non-issue. I still prefer to work with tungsten balance in a studio setting or location interior/night because there is a wider array of instruments available with the type of control I need. Example: Source 4 Lekos are inexpensive and indispensable for me, and I can put them on a line level dimmer (or DMX) for fine control. In a daylight situation, I'm usually dealing with a higher ambient level so a gelled Leko isn't going to do much. The options are the LED version of the unit which in its current generation is just approaching the output of the original but many times more expensive; or a Jo-Leko mod with an HMI engine on the back which gives great output but can't be dimmed (and the beam pattern never quite as clean).

I have heard anecdotally that a good chunk of shooters who do doc/corporate/broadcast type of shooting have gone the "daylight only" route. I can see the logic for certain environments but I'm still intrigued at what happens when one does an interview in a hotel ballroom or a living room at night, and you can't take advantage of existing practicals. I think back to when I shot a certain amount of that and I feel like I would have been hampered by not having tungsten at my disposal.
 
when i see a movie with an indoor scene thats very warm/yellowish overall, is it safe to assume that it was manipulated in post? or could it be that the camera was set to daylight white balance with tungsten lights used on the talent? is there a difference between the two options?
 
CharlesPapert said:
I have heard anecdotally that a good chunk of shooters who do doc/corporate/broadcast type of shooting have gone the "daylight only" route. I can see the logic for certain environments but I'm still intrigued at what happens when one does an interview in a hotel ballroom or a living room at night, and you can't take advantage of existing practicals. I think back to when I shot a certain amount of that and I feel like I would have been hampered by not having tungsten at my disposal.
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Most daylight only LEDs are brighter (and cheaper) than the bicolour variants. Now if you are moving with a small (car, train, plane) package, shooter and director lugging all, and may be doing a ballroom and a midday EXT or day window office.. well IMO you are best with daylights and some orange gel to tape on in the fixtures for the ballroom shot.

Maybe also fashions change (in line with equipment?) and a day key with an orange background is seen as aesthetically pleasing.

I often shoot a industrial workshop (etc) with doors open and real daylight hitting the subject with orange or green pracs in the b/g.. which I think looks great.

I still often use my kino as key for ints (or random bounce) it has daylight bulbs, for drama I have a selection of "daylight" ie Blue glass 40w tungsten bulbs which I would swap in to a practical bedside lamp or suchlike. Often I might 1/2 ctb bedroom practicals. Using low wattage pracs means you get away with less powerful keylighting too.

A few gels chucked in the sticks bag goes a long way on a small footprint shoot. Also a bit of black wrap.. this is often used in an office with horrid halogen top spots to black out the spot that is blasting the bald patch of the senior manager you are interviewing at his desk.

In the UK true tungsten is now rare due to the low energy drive.. CP did you know that it is no longer legal to sell domestic tungsten bulbs here in the uk (!) People like me ran out and bought boxes of them. Actually tungsten bulbs are still available in tool and agricultural stores as 'heavy duty' light bulb but not in domestic stores.

As for shooting tungsten.. I do it in my blacked out studio as we have 6 reds and a spacelight and many other fixtures that would cost a fortune to replace.

Also I use gelled to blue tung on INT locations when I can (drama), they do seem to have a magic missing from the kino. 2 reds though a 8.4 scrim is a fav of mine for a soft key.

Another factor is flexible files.. a bit of red desat will help in the ballroom with a day key. Also high ISO cameras (dips head for abuse) need less lighting.. my beeb interviews I mainly shot using windows as key with a bit of net curtains taped on that I had in my sticks bag.

Another consideration is of course battery lights which work in the field (outdoors) and dont have to be plugged in to shonky household circuits or fancy office buildings/industrial where the 'safety' people will chuck you out of their location for plugging in to the mains (hospitals, schools, railway bbc hq etc.)

To the OP.

I would suggest that 3-6 reds or tungsten fresnels had for a bargain will give you options but your goto kit bag is probably best avoiding tungsten fixtures and kitting with batt powered LED, personally Id take more lumens of daylight led fixtures and spend $5 on some gels.
 
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RedChalice said:
when i see a movie with an indoor scene thats very warm/yellowish overall, is it safe to assume that it was manipulated in post? or could it be that the camera was set to daylight white balance with tungsten lights used on the talent? is there a difference between the two options?
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As David said, many ways to do it. Theoretically there shouldn't be a significant difference between lighting a subject with tungsten under a daylight white balance and tungsten with full CTO under tungsten white balance. It's usually a better choice to do extreme color in post because in the latter example you are driving the red channel pretty far which may result in noisy skin tones. Depends on the camera. Generally I like to take the camera halfway and then do the rest in post.
 
Most digital cameras native color temperature WB is in the 5000 to 5500K range. You get the best sensitivity, DR and lowest noise with lighting in this range. However a true full spectrum black body radiator quality light source is still best and tungsten with correction filters for daylight is still the lowest cost option for this. Personally I love fresnels.
However I shoot a mostly indie doc style stuff with practicals and available light. A kit of a variety of photo grade high CRI CFL lamps in various color temps and wattages along with some China balls and a bit of grip gear can go a long way for very little cost. A few c-stands , bounce cards, some diffusion, and flags are extremely useful. Sheets of foam core , with silver, gold, and black spray paint make useful light modifiers for next to nothing in cost.
 
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I can't find the source, but I remember reading Stu Maschwitz explaining that he prefers 3000K over 6000K because of the way red light penetrates farther into the skin and is reflected differently. He said cooler lights made people look a bit more plasticky, even if you adjust the WB in the camera.
(edit: maybe I can't find it because it was a video...)

It must be a very small effect, and I'm not sure it would survive a blind test, but it's good enough for me: I bought my LED lights in the 2700K-3500K range.


edit2: it was indeed a video, and dedicated to something entirely different. I found it because I had actually asked him about this very issue in the comments :)
He replied, so check that out too:
http://prolost.com/blog/2012/11/30/watch-me-light-up-the-room.html
 
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I guess most of you didn't do b-w photography at school.

the blue filter was a trick for photos of rough old men and red for glamour girls

simply a mole (skin defect) is dark red and skin light red - so with a blue filter the darker Reds were filtered darker than the light Reds - red filter would lessen the 'skin defect' (I love freckles personally"

you will also know a red filter makes for amazing skies in b-w photograpy as the blue sky goes black - the red filter takes out the blue.

i have never given consideration to how this translates to colour digital recording .. But may add some credence to the concept of filming under warm lights.

the effect of colour under off colour sources is well covered in "the book of elli "

the he film is well wort a watch for many other reasons including the cam op skills of mr papert
 
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morgan_moore said:
the effect of colour under off colour sources is well covered in "the book of elli "

the he film is well wort a watch for many other reasons including the cam op skills of mr papert
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Uh...I didn't work on "The Book of Eli"...closest I can think of was "In the Valley of Elah"? Which is also worth watching, certainly not for anything I operated but for R. Deakins work!

It's an interesting theory that skin responds best to warm light, but I think the proof can easily be found in the pudding with some camera tests. The wild card here is that some cameras are indeed more responsive to one or the other standard color temps, so I would suggest that if someone was motivated to do it (and post results here, which would be great!), to use color correction filters so that the camera "thinks" it is seeing the same color. So here would be my recommended protocol

It would be ideal to use actual daylight but it would be hard to recreate the exact same size and intensity source between that and the tungsten unit. Next best thing: use a single source into a bounce or through heavy diffusion (the latter will probably warm up the color temp a bit, but as long as both sources go through the same frame, it will be apples to apples). Traditional tungsten head vs an HMI or extremely high CRI LED unit such as remote phosphor. Use a single source close to camera, no other light sources on the subject. Match output of the heads as closely as possible via scrims (vs dimming).


1) Camera setting 3200K. Shoot subject under tungsten lighting.
2) Camera setting 3200K. Shooting subject under daylight with an 85 filter.
3) Camera setting 5600K. Shoot subject under tungsten with an 80 filter.
4) Camera setting 5600K. Shoot subject under daylight.

Include a color chart with gray scale and grade the clips to that to take care of small variations in the color temps of the units used, filter anomalies etc.

According to Stu's theory, 1) and 3) should deliver more natural results than 2) and 4). And whichever was the better result of 1) and 3) would indicate that particular camera's preference for tungsten or daylight.
 
I've got a couple threads in the lighting forum for DIY 150 HID fresnels. Very affordable (under a hundred bucks if you have a fixture) and they look very pro. Ballast has no fan.

Not insanely bright, but very handy for the $$ - equivalent to about 500-600 watts of tungsten, but right around 5200k, depending on the globe used.

There's a version that works great in a 3" fresnel that's really my favorite (and the globe is awesome). It's a badass little problem solver when you need a little bit of daylight. Perfect hard light match for, say, a biax quad - may not be so useful in a room full of 4K HMIs though.
 
CharlesPapert said:
Uh...I didn't work on "The Book of Eli"...closest I can think of was "In the Valley of Elah"?
It's an interesting theory that skin responds best to warm light, .
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Sorry man - Valley of Elah is what I meant.. and the scene about identifying the colour of the car witnessed under sodium is relevant to this thread or Samuel Hs bit of the thread.

To some extent the camera should not be relevant as the 'theory' is about the colour of light that hits the subject and what the subject therefore reflects into the camera.

How it then plays off with actual camera and any noise implications after doing the colour correction will of course depend on the camera :)

S
 
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