Photography News issue 23

Technique 32

Photography News Issue 23 absolutephoto.com

Lighting academy Creative colour with flash& gels For striking portraits use your camera’s manual white-balance setting to put a spin on traditional colour correction techniques

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Words & pictures by Kingsley Singleton

This month we’re trying something a little different: a technique that takes the principles of colour correction filters and gels, and turns them on their head. Colour correction (CC) filters and gels are used to adapt your camera or flash to different temperatures of light (see About Colour Temperature on page 33 for a refresher). Of course, they’re used far less often in the age of digital photography because their most common application was in adapting daylight-balanced film to work with indoor, tungsten lighting. If you shot a lamplit portrait on daylight film everything would look too warm, but with the right strength of Colour Temperature Blue (CTB) filter on the lens you’d cut out some of the warmer tones, creating hues in your image closer to what your eye sees. Conversely a Colour Temperature Orange (CTO) filter would make daylight look like you were shooting with a tungsten light source. Naturally, on a digital camera, this is no longer an issue; instead of needing to adapt the light or shoot with correctly colour-balanced film, you’d simply set the white-balance to Auto (or specifically Tungsten/Incandescent or Daylight, and so on) and shoot away as normal. Another modern alternative is to shoot in Raw mode and correct the colour temperature when processing your images. However, CC filters and gels are still very useful when lighting is mixed and you need to balance two colour temperatures; for instance when using flash (which is usually balanced at around a 5500K temperature) and tungsten lighting (around 3000K) in an interior. In these cases, even the auto white-balance of a modern camera will struggle and you’ll end up with either the flash light too cool, or the tungsten light too warm. But place a CC gel over one of the light sources and you’ll either warm it up or cool it down to be in sync (or as close as possible). Gels, of course, are also often used to add a hint of colour to a portrait or still-life image, which is along the same lines as what we’ll be doing this month. Getting creative with colour correction So how do we get from the traditional route of using CC filters for lifelike results to the otherworldly look of the images here? That’s all down to putting a creative spin on how you use colour correction and how you adapt to the colour temperatures in the scene. Essentially the purpose is still to follow the regular colour correction process and end up with lifelike skin tones on the subject but instead of setting the camera’s white-balance to correctly reproduce the colours in this daylight scene, it’s manually set at a much

lower level. This means that when the flash that’s lighting the subject is used with a CTO filter, they’ll appear much closer to normal. That’s a lot to get your head around in the space of a paragraph, but get to grips with the following technique and all will become clear. Setting up We started off by setting up one Lencarta Safari 2 light on a stand to Amber’s left, positioning it slightly higher than her eyeline to give an angle, similar to the sun. Wanting to keep the light quite hard, which would complement the odd colours we’d end up with, we simply used a standard reflector dish as a modifier. In this configuration we metered for the ambient light, getting a reading of 1/100sec at f/11, ISO 200, and then, in manual mode, dialled in 1/160sec at f/11, ISO 200, in order to underexpose the background scenery a little. At these settings the flash power required to properly expose Amber was around 1/16th. Next we needed to fit the Colour Temperature Orange filter, covering the flash and adapting the light for the look we wanted. For this, we used a sheet of CTO filter, wrapped over the reflector dish and fixed using electrical tape. After test firing, it was obvious that the gel was diffusing the light slightly and lowering the illumination, so the power was increased to 1/8th. With Amber bathed in orange light from the gel on the flash, it was time to adapt the camera’s white-balance, simultaneously cooling off the background while making her skin tones look more natural. We first switched to the Incandescent white-balance setting (3000K), which was much lower than the Auto White Balance that recorded the scene at 5100K. Checking the results on screen, there was still too much orange, so we took the white-balance even further south by switching to the manual Kelvin setting and applying the lowest level (on the Nikon D810 we were using, this was 2500K). With this new setting the colours were getting into the right area, but due to the When the flash that’s lighting the subject is used with a CTO filter, their skin tones will appear close to normal

White-balanceat 2500K, withCTO filter on flash.

White-balance at 2500K, no filter or flash.

Above In the lower pic, setting the white- balance to 2500Kmakes the colours very cool as it’s not accurate for the natural light. But using the Colour Temperature Orange filter on the flash gives warmer colours and more natural skin tones, while though the background remains cool.

ACTO filter tapedover aSafari 2 flashhead.

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