Skip to main content

Working With Color

Lesson 8 from: Lighting with Constant Light

Mark Wallace

Working With Color

Lesson 8 from: Lighting with Constant Light

Mark Wallace

buy this class

$00

$00
Sale Ends Soon!

starting under

$13/month*

Unlock this classplus 2200+ more >

Lesson Info

8. Working With Color

You can mix Red, Green, and Blue to create any color you want. In most cases, this is a great way to add a splash of color to your scene. However, there are some instances when you’ll need an old fashion gel for color correction.
Next Lesson: The Fresnel Lens

Lesson Info

Working With Color

let's talk about color, We're going to talk about one of my favorite things and that is not just color correction. We're gonna talk about adding color for like sort of party effects, adding blue to a wall of red or green or something like that. Maybe you want to add a color cast to your scene and instead of doing it with post production, you do it in camera. So this is mainly video, but also for stills. Maybe you want to have things that look, you know, new Mexico yellow for that. Breaking bad kind of look or you want something that looks really green like that. Breaking bad kind of look. And so what you do is you would maybe depending on what you had in the olden days, you'd put a gel over your light to add some color. But now we have the RGB lights where we can make any color in the spectrum. So why wouldn't we use that? Well, for most cases that's going to work just fine. But there is a limitation with light emitting diodes, L E D lights and so are Rgb red, green, blue lights are L ...

E D lights. And because some of the physics involved limit how much light is produced. Well, we can run into problems. So let me explain it like this. This is a non scientific mark terms. So engineers out there and scientists, please forgive me. But the way this works is you have a spectrum of light coming from the sun and that's a nice equal distribution of light from your reds and yellows and science and magenta and blues and all that kind of stuff. It comes from the sun in a repeatable way. It's consistent and it's even across. So we have a certain amount from each part of the spectrum, tungsten lights are the same. You have a nice repeatable way that the light is distributed and you have all of the colors of the rainbow. You don't have as much of each color, but you have all of the colors and they come out the same way every time. So that's why these gels work really nicely. But when you start making colors from RGB lights and mixing them together to get something like maybe blue or yellow or red or something in between. What will happen is those LED lights because of the physics and how they're made with technology today. There can be little gaps, little valleys in the spectrum. And so you might be thinking you're getting all of the yellow or all of the blue that you would normally get from the sun, but you're not only getting a little bit of that. And so to our eyes, when we look at the scene, we're gonna see yellow agreeing a red or blue. And in most instances when we take a video or photo will also see that, but there are instances where those colors just vanish on camera and you'll get really unexpected results. And so in that instance, it's better to set your RGB light to white. And so that's what we're gonna show you were gonna set those lights to a 52 100 Calvin daylight temperature and put gels in front of our RGB lights. So we'll show you sometimes it's great to mix light and get some groovy effects. And other times you're gonna have to sit your RGB like to white put a gel in front of that. So to explain this more clearly, I'm gonna come back over here and on my computer, I have Photoshop open and this could be any application really, all I care about is this little color panel here and at the top, you can see this line and it has red and it goes through the entire color of the rainbow all the colors. It's like a color wheel that has been taken and put flat and a flat line and on the right hand side over here you have a number in degrees. So as I move this back and forth, 360 degrees all the way down to nothing to zero. So that is as if we were moving around in a circle on a color wheel. And so as we move those degrees mean different things. So the red, that would be read at 360 degrees. If I move this over, you can see we've got this little color here is blue, that's 244 degrees. And as we're moving the colors of the color wheel are measured in degrees. Just so we have an even way to represent Hughes now, if I go back to uh my lighting set up here, we've got some groovy fruit and things set up here. I have a Paavo tube, this Paavo tube can change colours, it can be red or green or blue or whatever we want it to be. So we're changing colors, you can see down here the colors are changing and we have a number here that shows up on the back of that Paavo tube and those numbers H. S. I. So hue and saturation and intensity are similar to those numbers that we had in Photoshop. And so if you wonder what those numbers are, they represent the colors on a color wheel in degrees. So we should be able to 3 60 get red like we had before and yep, got nice red light, you see that as red, red and we can get whatever. Okay so what we have is we have on the table we have some fruit and veg. So what I'm gonna do here is we're gonna move this this camera right here real fast Hannah, so she's gonna run in here and get that and to go away awesome. Think you're caught there. Okay, there we go. So what we're gonna do here first is we're not going to use this tube but I want to show you first is what happens when we use just a normal light with some gel, I'm gonna go over here, I have a normal little Paavo 60 B So final light And it is set to 50 200 Kelvin. And my video camera here is set also to 50 200 Kelvin. And so we'll put this back it Yeah, there we go. Good exposure there. So now let's show that fruit. So we have our fruit on the table, you can see clearly that we have an orange carrot. We've got a yellow and an orange and a red bell pepper. And now what I'm going to do is I want to just add a color cast to this. I want to add an orange, I mean the yellow color cast. So I have some gel. And yeah, we're gonna turn off all the other lights in the studio boom. So now we're only seeing the light from my for now here. So now we're gonna add this gel on top of this slips and try not to kick the light. So, I've got a gel on top of this, so that looks pretty cool. And then what we're going to do is show that fruit and you can see that we have a yellow cast. So it is equally illuminated everything as yellow. It's just a yellow cast. We're not doing color correction. We're just adding yellow here is normal light. You see those colors Behind here is our yellow gel. It works just fine. Works great. If I put a blue gel. So now I've got a blue gel to see me sticking this on there. Got a blue gel and put that in front of my thing. We can see our fruit. So you can see it's got a blue cast to it. There's our normal daylight balance, there's our blue color cast. So what I'd like to do is do that same thing with an RGB light. So we've got our Pravo tube, they can go to any color that we want. So I'm gonna move that guy out here, so it's gonna be out and about something like that and I'm going to turn it on and now I'm going to turn off this light. And now let's look and see. So we have a very blue a blue color cast and when we go and look at our veggies, what look at that carrot, That carrot is not a blue color cast carrot. That carrot is a wacky carrot. That is weird. So it has changed all of the colors. So the blue spectrum doesn't have all of the same blue in it as we would have from the sun. So, as we go through our colours, so we're going to yellow here, you can see we've got sort of a yellow cast. That works pretty good. If we go more to an orange, you can see where orange this is red, this is orange and this is orange, you can't tell the difference between those. We don't have an orange cast anymore. We have wacky colored fruit. And so that is not a good thing. If we go through these colors and it's going to sort of go, that is a blue, Okay, this is sort of where I want to sit. So this is a blue light from an RGB tube. If we can see this, we have nice blue lights and then go back to that fruit and notice we have our red bell pepper is black. Our orange carrot is black. Our orange bell pepper is black and are yellow. Bell pepper is weird. Something all right, so, what would happen if we took essentially the same color blue and put a gel on our Paavo tube instead of using the mix. So, this is what I'm gonna do. I'm changing my Paavo tube from a color mix two, a color temperature. So I'm going to put this up at 100 and this is at 5200 kelvin. So that is now white light. So, remember we had RGB w w we're using the white led light that is in this tube instead of the mix. So let's go back to our veggies. So we have our veggies here and now watch what happens when they put a blue gel in front of this. Now we have a blue tint and our colors are still good. So that's white, this is blue white blue. That is one of the reasons that in some instances you would it's better to use a gel instead of mixing RGB lights. So, let me show you this, this white, there's our yellow color casts. Here. It is yellow color cast and white and yellow color cast in white. All right, So, Theresa, if you can turn on the lights just for a second, the takeaway from that is RGB lights are fantastic and you can make all kinds of different colors and add different groovy effects. But specifically, if you're a video maker and you're thinking you're going to use RGB lights and never have to work with gels. Again, that's not the case in a lot of instances, as you saw, if you just try to mix those colors using the RGB mixture is gonna throw things off in a pretty radical way. That's really not good. Again, this has nothing to do with the manufacturer. So, all RGB lights have the same issue. It's the physics that are involved, not some manufacturing defect or something about that. It just has to do with the physics of L. E. D lights. All right, we've done a ton of stuff. We've learned about light light position, like modifiers, color all kinds of stuff. Now, it's time for us just to have a ton of fun. And so what we're gonna do is we are going to dive in learn a little more. And then we're gonna do all kinds of lighting setups, so hang on, Here we go, we're gonna do that next.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Tether Tools Pro Kit Discount
Tether Tools Starter Kit Discount
NanLite_WALLACE5.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

user-182390
 

Great course very informative and a pleasure to watch love the way you teach so easy to understand and follow through. learned a lot about continuous lighting ty

Alessandro Zugno
 

This is a very useful class for who want to start shooting video or photo with constant light. Creative Live should make more class on videography.

Student Work

RELATED ARTICLES

RELATED ARTICLES