In this video I'm gonna show you how using the gels in the studio
can add a splash of color to your backgrounds.
Adorama TV presents Take and Make Great Photography
with Gavin Hoey. Where you'll learn how to take stunning photos and then polish
them in post-production.
Hello i’m Gavin Hoey and your watching
Adorama TV. Brought to you by Adorama the camera store that was everything for us photographers.
And today i'm joined in the studio by
Philipa. She's gonna be the model for the day and this video is all about
colored gels. So colored gels, these little pieces a plastic
can be an absolute godsend if you're working in a small studio environment
like me
and you don't have dozens of different color backgrounds at your fingertips.
Now you might have noticed in my previous videos I’ve shot with a dark grey background.
There's a reason for that, because I like it. Not only do I like it but it’s also really
handy if you want to change the color by
adding gels. So let’s see how it going to work. So at the moment I've just got one key
light
above Philippa and nothing in the background at all. Let’s just take a picture and
see how this comes out. Okay here we go. So with that shot as you might imagine
what I end up with is a background that’s dark,
but did you imagine it was gonna go that dark? Completely black. Well
grey if you don't light it is gonna go black. However
if I add in a background light for example this one
and I add in a gel, got a red gel in here.
That is going to completely change the look of the shot.
Let's take a picture and show you. Here we go. Now I promise you that really is the
same
background, the same gray fabric background
as we started with, but this time it’s got that lovely deep red color.
In fact I can make this background red, I can make it
blue, I can make it green, I could even make it
yellow using the supplied kit of gels.
Of corse there plenty more gels out there other than the ones that come with the
Streaklight
in the kit.
Let's run through the the basic setup for this. For my main lighting I’m gonna use
something known as beauty lighting or butterfly lighting, it's
basically a soft box up top and then a reflector
below just to reflect some light back underneath Philipa's chin and light the
shadows
in that part of the face. Really simple, really straightforward.
If you want to see more information on some lighting techniques don't forget to
check out the Adorama Learning Center
well you'll find tons of information.
My background light is on
and I've got a red gel in there at the moment but I'm gonna change it.
You don't have to have just one color gel. So I’m gonna add in
a yellow to the red to get orange. So
let's see how that works, let's just take a picture, here we go.
And sure enough we got that beautiful strong
orange glow behind Philipa. That looks absolutely fantastic.
Now we can change the intensity of that orange glow simply by changing
the power of the light and because I'm using the the Streaklight system here,
I can actually do it on here on the remote control on top of the camera here. So
I can lower the output from the background light by one stop.
We'll take the same shot and that's going to give me a much darker deeper richer color,
or I can increase the power by a stop in the other direction.
That's going to give me a much brighter much more vibrant
rich orange color in the other direction as well. So you can tweak
and change the colors of your background by changing the intensity of the background
light.
That's why grey works so well. if you tried to do this with a white background you'd
end up with pastel colors.
So that's the basic idea, what were gonna do now is just do a shoot using these
basic principles.
Okay let's get going, are you ready?
Well there we go, we got some
absolutely fabulous pictures there. Philipa, what a star.
I think they're gonna look absolutely wonderful, but I don't know let's get
them into Photoshop
and I'll edit my favorite picture right now. Don't forget to check out Adorama's
latest contest
and your chance to win amazing prizes. I find these gels to be
absolutely essential for my small studio photography
but the color you get isn't always exact
simply by looking at them for example the red isn't quite red, the the green
definitely isn't very green.
There's a number of factors that control the color. Yes we saw in the video that
changing the background light will change the color.
But there's other factors, more subtle factors things like the white balance to
use,
and also the background you project your color onto.
The grey I used perhaps isn’t quite perfectly grey i think there’s a
hint of blue in there. So if you want a pure grey go for something like a
roll of continuous paper, thunder grey. What a great choice that would be if your doing a
lot of gel work.
Alternatively you can do what I do which is just pop into Photoshop,
and were gonna make a few changes to the color there. So
here in raw I'm gonna jump over to the
HSL stroke grayscale tab and of corse if your using Lightroom
it’s exactly the same in Lightroom. Here I can make adjustments to the hue,
the saturation and the luminance of the colors in my image.
Let’s start with the hue. Looking at the picture the plan was really simple, we've got
this
sorta purple chiffon material, I gelled the background to go purple
and we chose the makeup to tie in, but somehow somewhere along the line it
doesn't quite come together. This lipstick is definitely the wrong
shade of purple. So let's see if we can change it. We can change it by moving the
sliders that are appropriate and I think the
lipstick is kinda magentary, if I move the magenta slide, yep you can see I
can
really shift that around and I can match the lipstick to the background and the
chiffon, but
it just doesn't look right. So rather than doing it that way around I'm gonna match
the the material
and the gel to the lips. So if I move the purples.
Yep there we go, we can just make it a sort of a pinky purple.
Maybe we'll just push a little bit more magenta up as well.
Now we're getting a little bit closer in color and that looks
a lot butter. But we can do more than that of corse, because we can change the
saturation too.
So on the saturation we’ll just put up the purple's a little bit
maybe just pull down the magenta’s. Now we're getting a much closer match.
Finally you've got the luminance I can make my purples brighter
and maybe just pull that down, or maybe just pull that up a little bit on the magenta’s.
There we go, so now we're getting a a look that is much much closer.
I am not too worried about absolute accuracy. It is a feeling that i'm looking
for rather than an exact copy in color.
Just to show you where we started that's what came out the camera
and there we go with a little bit of tweaking in Photoshop that's what actually
I had in my mind.
Well if you've enjoyed this video and want to see more videos from myself and the other
amazing presenter's here on Adorama TV,
you've got to click on the subscribe button.
I'm Gavin Hoey, thanks for watching.
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