What gels do you guys frequently use

Michael Solomon

Michael Solomon

Well-known member
I'm looking to expand my creative selection of gels and was wondering what some of the more interesting gels you reach for are and what you use them for.

I use your standard varying levels of cto, ctb, and diff, but I'm looking for some other gels that might come in handy in the future
 
Lee 650-653... Awesome for turning tungsten into warehouse/industrial/street lighting. Awesome if you want to get that gritty effect or actually match on location.
 
You can always try Steel Blue or Dark Steel Blue along with Apricot. It seems to be a pretty popular party gel sort of mixture.

Also 1/4 and 1/2 Straw are also some nice warming gels as well.

Last but not least, if you haven't tried Congo Blue, you haven't lived!
 
Great suggestions so far =)

What does straw offer over CTO, does it just have a little more yellow in it as opposed to red?
 
CTB, CTO, ND, of course.

But... outside of that,

Cosmetic Peach, CTS, PlusGreen, MinusGreen, SteelBlue, Lavender, Rose, and some others I cannot remember. The Storaro series (basically means party gels) is too much for me. I've yet to shoot a film like a Joel Schumacher Batman, or something like Suspiria.
 
Outside of the normal color balancing gels, I use Rosco MT2 (for the sodium vapor look),
Rosco 60 cyan (for the mercury vapor look), 1/2 & full straw for various warming effects
such as candlelight, gas lanterns.....
 
Lee 126 does really weird things with yellow. Everything goes mauve - apart from yellow which goes red. Very special effect, but great for something special. Ryan's cosmetics are really useful with actors with nasty skin and no dedicated makeup artist - the peachy colour looks quite good - but does come across a bit orange if the other lighting is open white tungsten. If you want to light drum kits - then Lee congo 181 is great. This also is interesting to try as a lens filter to create a really dark moonlight.

If you have a small lensed camera - shooting through the swatch books can give really interesting results! Not really optical quality - but I find they don't soften too much.
 
1/4 and Full CTB, 1/8 and 1/4 Orange, ND3 and ND6, 1/4 Green, and cosmetic peach.

Usually though, I'll mix the tungsten and daylight balanced lights. For a recent horror short, I used a tungsten 4 bank Kino as key, and a daylight 1 bank with 1/4 green as backlight/fill. Pretty cool effect.
 
bruce southerland said:
Outside of the normal color balancing gels, I use Rosco MT2 (for the sodium vapor look),
Rosco 60 cyan (for the mercury vapor look), 1/2 & full straw for various warming effects
such as candlelight, gas lanterns.....
Click to expand...
+1 on the 60 cyan, that's one of my favorites. We used it on a backlight in a strip club scene and it looked beautiful. It was particularly good for one part of the scene where the key was pure red from some LED cans that were at the location, it just balanced out the color perfectly. I'd imagine it could work for moonlight as well.

I like LEE 102 as well, it's a nice amber that's not too saturated. Works good as backlight too on the warmer side of the spectrum.

A couple weeks ago I shot a bunch of daytime indoor stuff all tungsten balanced and I used 3/4 orange on the windows and skylights, then I put in ND .9 when the window was actually in the shot. It corrected the color temperature to exactly 3200°, whereas the combo full CTO / ND gels are too warm.

As far as diffusion, I'm really liking Rosco 3046. It's a frost that's actually a really dense diffusion, somewhere between 216 and 250, but with nowhere near the light loss. It also keeps the beam in pretty much the same shape rather than spreading it all over the place.
 
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