Lighting Puzzle

I have (4) 1x1 Litepanels 5600 degree kelvin.

Sometimes I am in a very bright room (a lot of sunlight) and I want to use the Litepanel to augment the daylight. Like fill in some shadow on a face. The light coming through the windows is about 9000 degrees kelvin. It is blue sky with green mountains below.

How can I gel the 5600 degree kelvin Litepanel to match the light coming through the window? A plusgreen gel?

Thanks,
Dave Bingham

Hey Dave, this is a Final Cut Pro forum...troubleshooting and editing. Lighting issues aren't really our thing. Might want to try a cinematography site.


www.derekmok.com

It's a blue gel. You can get it in an production store.

All the best,

Tom

dbinghamnc Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I have (4) 1x1 Litepanels 5600 degree kelvin.
>
> Sometimes I am in a very bright room (a lot of
> sunlight) and I want to use the Litepanel to
> augment the daylight. Like fill in some shadow on
> a face. The light coming through the windows is
> about 9000 degrees kelvin. It is blue sky with
> green mountains below.

How do you know that the light is 9000K? Are you using a color temperature light meter? Does the light change, or do you expect it to change, during the course of shooting?


>
> How can I gel the 5600 degree kelvin Litepanel to
> match the light coming through the window? A
> plusgreen gel?

If, in fact, the outdoor light is actually 9000K, then you would (or could) use a 1/2 CTB gel to bring the 5600K lighting up to match the outdoor light.

Litepanels sells gels for their own lights (looks like a 1/2 CTB for a 1x1 is about $30 US).


>
> Thanks,
> Dave Bingham

No problem... One stop shopping here at LAFCPUG (though I wouldn't rely on getting many of your more cinematography/lighting oriented questions answered here)...
;-)


-Dave

P.S. - If you visit the Rosco website, they have a few technical papers with "calculator" charts that you can use to figure out which gels to use in a given situation.

Hi Dave:

I agree with the others, LAFCPUG is not really frequented by a lot of DPs, but there are a few of us here. D-Mac is definitely on the right track but I would add that your 9000k is really pretty meaningless over the course of a shoot, unless you are doing that shoot in one shot of about 30 seconds. The color temperature of the sun changes throughout the day and changes constantly. Your 9000k reading will undoubtedly change within 5-10 minutes and could easily fall to 6000k in just a few seconds.

5600k is an arbitrary daylight balance color temperature on lighting because you have to have a baseline somewhere, right? I would also caution against trying to approach color temperature too pedantically. If you were able to make the output of your LitePanels match the 9000k, I can almost guarantee that you would see that "correct" color temperature in post on a broadcast accurate monitor and then instruct your editor to "warm it up" because 9000k is amazingly blue, I find that unless you are going for an effect, few people like their picture to be very blue these days. Leaning toward the warm and rich color spectrum is much more common and desirable with most projects these days that have people in them, unless you are specifically going for a look. Unless you are going for the cold, blue and very dead Laura Palmer wrapped in the plastic from "Twin Peaks", people don't look good if they are even slightly blue.

The general rule of thumb is to try to color balance and expose for your skin tones and not worry as much about the BG. If I were shooting in a room that had 9000k color light blasting through a window, I would cover that window with a combo gel like CTO + ND .6 [www.filmtools.com], that would probably bring the color temp of that window light closer to where your LitePanels are and it would reduce the output by two stops, possibly allowing you to run your camera at a larger F-stop and would allow your relatively wimpy output LEDs to actually become more functional when shooting with ambient daylight. I would then manually white balance and look at it on a color accurate monitor. Especially when shooting video, I would use my eye and a good monitor and zebras more than trying to match exact color temps. It needs to look good more than it needs to match some arbitrary color temp.

Just my approach, others are valid too. I would just caution against approaching lighting from a technician's POV because lighting is an art as is color balance and temp.

Dan Brockett

Thank you very much for the input.

Dan,

Thanks for adding the additional info (I restricted myself to the smallest context possible).


In the larger context, I totally agree that you should consider what you want things to look like, then figure out how to make it happen...


-Dave

Yeah, I have a tendency to write articles disguised as responses on boards ;-) Too verbose for sure.

Dan

BTW the above post by Dan is perhaps his shortest in memory, which makes us all sad and confused. But hey, it's Monday.




Michael Horton
-------------------

Dan Brockett Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Yeah, I have a tendency to write articles
> disguised as responses on boards ;-) Too verbose
> for sure.
>
> Dan

Oh, no, on the contrary, reading informative posts is one of the best things about these forums. These forums are often quite enlightening (to me, at least, and even if we're waaayy off topic)...

Thanks again, Dan.


-Dave

BTW, although Dan's response will pretty much give you what you need, you might want to post or at least peruse, the brilliant DP Roger Deakins web site. He has a forum and answers most of your questions himself. It's among the very best as he is the very best.

[www.deakinsonline.com]

Michael Horton
-------------------

Yes, I am at basically a slug on the sidewalk compared to the Ferrari 599-like level Roger's eye and experience. He is definitely one of my favorite DPs and a genius. He is also one of the only ASC level DPs who actually keeps his own very informative and excellent website, he really does play it forward with sharing his immense knowledge.

Dan