In this video I get creative with
colored gels in my small home studio.
Hello I'm Gavin Hoey and watching
AdoramaTV brought to you by Adorama the
camera store that's got everything for us
photographers. And today you join me back
in my small home studio and I'm going to
be using coloured gels, but color gels
creatively using gels in ways in which
they perhaps weren't designed but create
amazing images. Now to do this I''m going
to use a few types of colour gel. This is
perhaps my go-to colour gel for normal
gel use. These little squares of gel
they come in all sorts of colors and
being designed for lighting they are
heatproof, and I can stick them straight
on my lights and get some amazing colored
effects but we're not gonna do that.
Today we're going to use these
creatively and not just these. I'm also
going to use this, now this isn't
designed for photography. In fact
we got this from the local florist, but it
is a gel material, it is colored
cellophane for wrapping flowers. Now
under no circumstances am I going to stick
this onto my lights, because it will burn
or melt and get pretty horrible so it's
not designed for photography. However if
it's used away from the lights
this stuff is brilliant, it adds color to
the scene, and of course I didn't just
buy red I also got some blue as well, So
let's get a model in, we'll get some lights in
and we'll get shooting. So today I've
been joined by Beth who can help me by
doing some brilliant modeling this is
quite difficult to do because it's going to
be just tight headshots. Now for the gels
the first gel I'm using is going to be
the sheets of gel, now this is the
proper gel stuff you would normally put
in front of your lights. Well, it is going
to go in front of the light, but it's
going to go in front of Beth and I mean
it's gonna go really close as well.
Lets pop that out the way first,
now because we are shooting just tight
headshot, I'm going to use a large
softbox as my background to give me a
pure white background you can use any
sort of background you like, it doesn't have
to be white but i think it works really
well with the shots I've got my lights
set. I need a small light source for this
because it's going to give me a nice
hard defined line, where the shadows go
from the gel and not the gel, and I'm
just going to check my exposure, so I'm
getting f8 at the front of Beth, and if I meter
off the back, I'm getting f8 as well, now
that will guarantee me a pure white
background, and if you want to see how
this works
check out my previous videos on the
Adorama Learning Centre where you can discover
how you can use a softbox as a background
Ok so f8 is dialled into the camera, lets just
like a test shot like this, ok and we get a
nice clean tight headshot. So what I'm going
to do, is I'm going to add in the gel and
I'm just gonna hold this.
I'm going to hover it right in front of
Beth, just a little bit, and if I take a
picture, now that works okay but it's not
quite as sharp and defined a line as I
would like, and that because my arms just
aren't long enough. Now the closer I can
get this to Beth, the harder the line is
going to be, but I can get him some help
get someone to hold it, or we can get
Beth to hold the for us, and that's what
we're gonna do. We're gonna to mix this up a
little bit as we take a few shots.
So for the next set up I'm going to use
an off cut of this... this is the
cellophane - a get that's not really a gel, but
works in basically the same way, now what
I've done is I've scrumpled it up and
sort of straightened it out, to give it a
distressed pattern and then I've made a
small hole in the middle and it's that whole
that I'm going to shoot through, so that
means I need to hold this between Beth
and the front my lens and in fact it's going
to go really, really, close to my lens.
Ok, now the light I've changed ever so slightly.
I've gone for a slightly bigger, softer,
beauty dish, we don't need that hard edge
anymore.
The background is still white, but that
might not be the right look let me show you
Let's just take a test shot first of all.
Here we go, and when I do that I can see
that that works really well on Beth, there are
areas that are sort of pinky red and
area's that are normal colour,
however that background is still white,
and that's really what white backgrounds do.
They will blow out even through like
light coloured gels, so I'm going to decrease the
power of the background and I can do that
here using the StreakLight remote
control, because i have a second Explore
600 around the back
powering that big soft box so let's just
drop that down to a lower power. I'll take
it down 2 stop's, see how that looks, so
now it's not quite white, it's more of a
gray color and of course gray when you
pass it through a gel will pick up the
color of the gel. ok let's take a few
shots back to you, ready here we go,
So this cellophane, because it's used to
wrap flowers normally, we got this at my
local florist. It comes in really great big
long length so we can use that to our
advantage.
so what I've got a length here that we
fold it up I'm going to wrap this around
the back and we're going to use it to create
some interesting really high art
pictures here we go let's pop that
around you.
Ok. Lets go and take some shots,
and of course I can cut this into a
really thin strips and give Beth just a
thin strip of the cellophane to play
with it, and kind of pull it around, and see what creative
things Beth can come up with that.There you go.
Well there we go, we've got some great
shots using well gels in all sorts of
creative ways.
Let's get one of these shots into
Photoshop and we'll do a bit of editing right now!
Once again the combination of
good lighting and a good model and great
makeup from a makeup artist really makes
the post-processing a lot quicker and
simpler.
However it's not that there's nothing to
do, there's always something to do, and in
this case it's really onto the
background. So i had a hundred and twenty
centimeter roundish softbox at the
background and although that was fine most of
the time occasionally it was a bit small.
But the fix is really simple,
let's just have a look at one of the
pictures and how I'm going to do it.
So here's the problem you can see the edge
of the softbox up here and in the top
left corner, but also in the bottom right
corner. Now Beth was wearing a strapless
top because I wanted lovely clean
shoulder line and in this case I've got
part of the top coming through, so let's
start with this by fixing that area here.
Now to do it I''m actually gonna use the
crop tool so if i get the crop tool here,
inside Photoshop, and then I rotate this
around a little bit as I rotate this
around I can go all the way around, and
kind of lose that top. But I lose a
couple of other bits as well, I've lost
quite a large part of a hand here on the
right and a large chunk of hair there as well
Now to get this back, I'm just going to
re-crop this image, so we'll drag out a
little bit and we'll drag up a little
bit. I'm just going to go to the edges of
the hair and the hand and that's
pretty .
Now when I click on the tick, that's
going to crop the image down and give me
the clean shot but there's still
part of the background here, there is
part of the soft box there, and these
checkerboard patterns here too. Now of
course I could fix some of this with
cloning I could have cloned in hands and
hair but that never really looks good and the
solution I'm going to come up with now
is going to be quick and simple and I
can use it on all my other images and
it's going to save me a ton of time and
it goes like this I'm going to swap from
the crop tool to the brush tool and with
the brush tool going to come down and
make sure my foreground color is set to
white now here is why i had white as my
background.
It's because if I paint white with just
a standard paintbrush, it's going to look like
it's the background because pure white
background from photography is the same
as a pure white background when you
actually pain it in with a paintbrush. Here you go
Worth spending the time getting that
lovely white picture background in
camera and if I zoom in a little bit and
we get the paint brush again and this
time i can just do the hair as well so
a little bit more time here would be
useful but for speed, I can very quickly just
go and sort out that little bit of
stray hair that was coming down on
the image and there you go there is my
final picture completed.
Well I've had great fun playing with
gels of all sorts of sizes and colours,
and of course you want to see more
videos from myself and the other amazing
presenters right here at AdoramaTV, you
should be clicking on that subscribe button
I'm Gavin Hoey thanks for watching