Hey this is Daniel Norton,
I'm here in my studio in New York City
with Ashley you know,
making some portraits, and actually
what I'm doing here is I'm going to talk
a little bit about cosmetic or beauty gels.
I got this kit here, and this comes
from a question I got, actually somebody
sent me a DM, and they said you know what
level of CTO should I put on my light
when I'm shooting a portrait to warm it
up, and my answer that was none... right cuz
CTO is for adjusting your camera, or your
lights to match tungsten light, right?
It's color temperature orange, and while
it will warm up the skin tone depending
on the person you're shooting, and
depending on situation,
it can make them
look too orange, like it doesn't look natural.
So there's these gels, and I
think there may be less well-known
because whenever I mention them..
people are like what?
Called beauty or cosmetic gels there's all
kinds of different ones here,
cosmetic burgundy, cosmetic peach, and
they basically are soft subtle colors that are
designed for skin tone.
So I'm gonna kind of walk through,
just as a really simple
portrait set up, which actually will kind of
show you guys you know, what they do
and how they work,
and yeah here we go so..
I've got a Profoto A1's here...
I got one in the back giving me like a just a
little light on the background, and then
I have one here inside a thirty-foot
Octa, with a grid that's gonna be my
key-light, and the way we'll start...
we're at f/5.6, 250th of a second.
I'm gonna start by
just doing the TTL exposure..
with no gels, this is just the,
the naked flash.
My camera is set on flash white balance
and let's see what we get..
so the flash is on...
but again no gels yet..
Good, alright and
that looks pretty nice... you know,
it's a nice portrait,
she looks great
you know... her skin tone looks correct
right, but now we want to mess around and
warm it up a little bit.
I have a couple of options.
What you normally want to do
is take your different gels, and kind of
hold them up in front of your face, and
if you like, or the subject...
and decide... I went with...
I'm going to do the strong one first.
I have a really strong color like...
this is a peach, heavy,
this is 'Moroccan Frost'.
Spoiler alert....this doesn't look good,
and then we also got a lighter one, which is,
which i think is gonna work better for
us, but let's take a look.
I'm simply gonna put it on my key-light,
now again I'm putting it on my key light,
if I tried to change white balance and
post over the whole image, or I you know
I put a little white balance change in
the camera it would change the whole
photo... I don't want to do that,
I just want to change the the key-light,
and I am in TTL,
so it should compensate.
Let's see... focusing, yeah...
whoosh.... oh look at that,
background light did not fire, see
cool, you can see that okay.
This is very extreme right... and for this
situation, and for Ashley, I think nooo!
There will be people that this will look
great on you, know it really depends on
their skin tone when they're starting, if
they've got a very kind of a warm skin
tone, that has greens in it, it can
help counteract it...
but I think that's just way too much...
I think we're gonna go with
this one, which is a cosmetic tint
I think they call it, and I'm just gonna
throw it in my gel holder,
same thing...
I've got... basically I've just got the Profoto
gel holder on this ...
you know they give
you color correction gels in the set,
but I like to cut my own gels,
and I'm gonna use this instead,
you can also just drape
the gel over the head,
what I would do is like I say...
test everything before you
cut them, because you may not want
certain gels for certain people..
you know...
and then you'll learn over time.
And actually make notes...
you know like hey we
know actually it looks good with this
one... we can add it next time.
So this is now the secondary one,
boom and we can see now how much
more subtle that is..
Right, so Flash, Moroccan and now our just
Cosmetic Tint.
Right we can see though,
let's get rid of the Moroccan one cuz
nobody.... nobody likes that.
Maybe somebody likes that, but not me
so you see the subtle difference here,
it's warm but her skin still looks the same.
It basically looks like if she was in
the Sun, and had like a little bit of a tan.
It looks more natural, it doesn't
look like she's orange right?
It doesn't look you know,
strange and jaundiced and
it just looks nice, and it actually helps
with the contrast of the image too by
the way, because you just bring in the
white areas of her skin, those really
light areas.
Do you like a little bit of...
a you know a little more of a color,
so shoot if you like that, cuz that's
the one I like.
I mean note that it does change
everything, so if you are doing let's say
fashion, and you don't want change the
color of the clothing then you don't
want to do this necessarily, but for
portraiture I think this is exactly what we want.
You know we can see that,
yeah this is actually you look almost
directly, I actually like the shadow on her face...
you guys can let me know if you like
shadow, I don't think you do, who knows maybe
you guys like shadow.
Yeah come out a bit slightly...
there we go, one more like that.
Let's do one more, which is my focus spot,
good, good, good...
yeah I like that, it's warmed up, it looks
nice...
you know it doesn't look unnatural, and I
think it's a great portrait.
So super simple like that guys,
so I think right now... like these days ....
people say these days - these days,
I don't know that means...
You know people are using gels like
crazy, gels are a huge trend but they're
mostly using lots of color gels, and
we've done a bunch of simple colored gel.
But this is a more subtle way to use
color, and actually if you're working as
a pro you want to move to that next level.
these are the kind of things that
can kind of set you.. different than the
rest, right there's no preset that I'm
using here, it's in my lights, so nobody
can duplicate this by figuring out how I
adjusted color channels or whatever, and
also it's gonna look that way even on
the back of my camera if I wasn't
shooting tethered, because the light is
that color, super simple and like I said
I would get a set of them, since you
don't really necessarily know what you like.
I would go with the set, it's called
The Rosco Beauty Gels, I'll put a link,
and when you get a new subject in front of
you put them in some bright light, hold it
you know in front of them,
and get a feel for which one looks the
best and then try a couple,
and see what you like right>
You see is that I will put Ashley's
information in the description for you
guys to follow her...
Follow me @DanielNortonPhotographer
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and I'll see you next time OnSet.