By adding a blue gel to the flashes the color of the flash would become the same color as the background overcast daylight. As long as the flash tube is covered by the gel, it doesn’t matter whether you have your gel on the inside or outside of the softbox.

use flash gels to color your lighting | Discover How to use flash gels to color your lighting | Discover

Our lighting set up included one Profoto B2 Off Camera Light, modified by an OCF 2×3 soft box as the main light and one Profoto B1 Off Camera Light modified by a Zoom Reflector and a 20 degree grid as a hair light. Elements like red streaks or blue undertones and these are the result of me testing various lens filters…. The pink one had a very tight grid on it so that I would only get a patch of light, while the blue and yellow had barn doors on them so that there would be somewhat of a horizontal line dividing the colors.Wilhelmina Volter by Dima Bushkov on Flickr (licensed CC-BY) - white balance set for flash, resulting in background having a slight blue tint and helping the subject stand out. With 15 years of experience as a photographer, she specializes in capturing the beauty of nature, travel, and fine art. The setup couldn’t be simpler as it’s only one light, but the trick comes from adjusting your cameras white balance or Kelvin setting when you take the shot. So if you set your camera’s WB to “tungsten” you will capture the background without any colorcast and it will look neutral. It is common for a gel manufacturer to publish the transmission coefficient or even the spectral transmittance curve in the swatch book and catalogs.

Profoto gels | Profoto (UK)

I recommend you start with a full CTO and adjust by adding or reducing the color temperature correction by either combining gels or using gels of lesser strength. Every gel has some amount of light loss meaning the color gels will cut total output from your flash. I’ve circled it in the top right of each image, but when you shoot the CTB/CTO splice ordinarily, it comes out very visually warm in the middle where the CTO gel is. Of course, no lighting setup article from JHP would be complete without a few more advanced setups to test your patience and sanity. However, although listed as full CTB, and both are blue, the differences between the two gels were very apparent.

Thankfully though, in todays setup I will be showing you how to mix coloured gels with incredible ease, in fact it’s so easy, we’ll only be using one light to do it! What you are attempting to do is to negate the effect of the Tungsten by adding blue light to the ambient environment. You add pieces of velcro either side of the flash head, and pieces of velcro at either end of the flash gel. The Roscolux sampler pack contains several strengths of both CTO (Color Temperature Orange) and CTS (Color Temperature Straw? Once everything is in place, you can situate yourself further away to take the shots and then invite the subject in.