how to get blue and orange color temperatures in same scene??

A

astrozombie

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Want to emulate this look, with blue moonlight in foreground against warm orange light ( I do have an 500 watt Omni Light with a photoflex softbox, a 200 watt Lowel pro-light, and a photoflood style light with an umbrella).

Want to do the look in camera (please don't try and convince me to do it in post- I doubt Ill ever go that route).

is it best to...

balance to daylight (letting any tungsten go warm), and use a double blue gel on the Omni to get the moonlight? Does a double blue gel cut my 500 watts more significantly than a regular blue?

or:

Should I balance to tungsten (giving me my moonlight with a CTB gel), and use a warm filter for any lights sources i want warm/orange? If I'm balanced to Tungsten, does a CTO gel give me orange, or do I need lets say, a stronger orange color like a vivid orange special effect type gel or something- or maybe double orange (forgive the basic nature of that question)?

I'm realizing this question has a lot to do with the nature of gels.

Thanks in advance.
 

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astrozombie said:
Want to emulate this look, with blue moonlight in foreground against warm orange light
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I hate to say this, but in the frames you attached the lighting looks so fake and artificial. Real moon-light is very dim compared to any man-made light source, so the reality of candle-light against moon-light might be a touch more believable. Now if it was supposed to be a bright blue neon sign glaring in through the window, then I might buy the shots you posted.
 
If its good enough for Stanley...

If its good enough for Stanley...

Yeah, it looks fake, but it also looks awesome, especially in the context of the dream-like alternate New York Kubrick created for Eyes Wide Shut. I'm doing an old artist's approach where you copy a master in order to learn. Kubrick lit naturalistically but would do the uber-blue moonlight thing for some of his night scenes.

Maybe if he were around today in the post-kino-flo era, he might tone it down a bit, since he loved natural-looking light. He ain't around to tell me tho, so I'll be copying this.

Actually these, since I decided my scene is all moonlight:
 

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In this scene, I would say there is a daylight balanced light such as an HMI coming in from outside the window, and the table lamp and light source in the hallway are tungsten light sources. By setting your white balance half way between daylight and tungsten, the daylight will actually appear blue instead of white, and the tungsten will appear orange. You can play with the level of color to your liking in post using saturation.

If you are trying to do this using only tungsten light sources, you can add CTB gel to your tungsten light source outside the window, and again leave the lamp and hallway lights as tungsten. The CTB will cause light loss so I would look at using a 1000w to 2000w single light source (single because the moon can not cast two shadows) then gel it and angle it very high to simulate the height of the moon. The 500w you can use on the hallway open face aimed at the wall or ceiling depending on the look you like.

I would not use any umbrella's or softbox here, it will only eat your light even more and the simulated moon light shown in your image is a hard light source with hard shadows which seems to work well for the scene. I like the look personally, it adds color separation to the foreground and background which is a clever way to get some "cheap" art direction on your set.

Best thing to do is set it up, test and try.
 
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I think Star is about right. I like to use daylight or tungsten presets in the camera, not in-between settings, because I can pre-visualize and reproduce colors more readily that way. It's just a choice, suit yourself.

Clearly the moonlight is very blue and while I agree it is probably a daylight HMI source, full CTB on a tungsten fixture works fine. The practical in the delectable Nicole Kidman shot looks like a standard 2700-2800K incandescent on a hand squeezer to me and behind Cruise the light is not white but warm as well and probably supplied by a tungsten head with 1/4 straw or something like that.

There is very little blue energy in a tungsten source and you lose nearly two stops as you filter out the warm tones and pass the cooler ones.

I've looked at a lot of moonlight in rooms just to see how nature does it and the light usually enters level or just above the level (as it does most of the time with daylight) and get more realistic results to my eye if I don't raise the source too much. BTW, moonlight, since it is reflected sunlight, is white not blue, but it's so weak our eyes see it as blue due to the Purkinje effect. Besides, Hollywood has told us moonlight is blue since the arrival of color :)
 
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