Awesome Cold Look With CTO Gel And Tweaking White Balance
Jan 29, 2014
Laya Gerlock
Laya Gerlock is a Portrait and Product photographer based in the Philippines. His passion is teaching and sharing his knowledge in Photograpy and has been doing this for 6 years.
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A few weeks back I wrote an article about stopping down the ambient light by 2-3 stops and using flash to expose for your subject, kind of a Magic Bullet look. Today I wanted to make an addition to that article – how you can add a CTO gel to your flash and change your white balance to get a different feel and add “Whapak” to your shot.
What You’ll Need:
A DSLR, equipped with an off camera flash trigger. (I use my trusty poverty wizards – shown below – for these shots)
A Flash with a Full CTO Gel – I use rosco sun 85 gel (lightstand is optional).
How to Pull It Off:
I used the same technique of underexposing the background 2-3 stops and using my flash to correct the exposure on the subject.
This is how it looks like with the setting set “normally” i.e. white balance is set to flash.
ISO 200, 1/160 @ f18. Speedlight is @ full power. WB=FLASH.
When I put a CTO Gel on my flash it looks like this. The CTO gel cuts your flash down by about -1 stop so you have to compensate either by increasing the ISO or opening up the aperture. The subject here becomes orange because the white balance used on her is “incorrect”.
Camera and flash settings: ISO 200, 1/160 @ f13. Speedlight is at full power. WB=FLASH.
Switching the camera White Balance to Tungsten(Incandescent), to make everything bluer. Because my flash has a CTO Gel on it, it compensates for the subject orange color and makes it correct again. Basically we have aligned the strobe and camera with an orange look which pulls the rest of the image to the blue tones.
Camera and flash settings: ISO 200, 1/160 @ f13. Speedlight is at full power. WB=TUNGSTEN
The Setup Shot:
For this shoot I only had a bare sb-600 with CTO gel on a lightstand.
Without CTO Gel.WB=Flash.
With CTO Gel and WB=Tungsten.
Final Shots and Comparisons
Model is a Philippine based photographer, Jay Jay De Guzman.
Model is a Philippine based photographer, Milk Mendoza.
I actually like both options: both with compensating for the CTO gel in camera and simply leaving it as it is, getting a bit of an orangy look. But I like how changing the white balance makes everything on a colder tone, and makes your subject really pop out from your background.
Thanks to The Team. Me(Laya Gerlock aka LSG), Milk Mendoza and Jay Jay De Guzman.
Laya Gerlock
Laya Gerlock is a Portrait and Product photographer based in the Philippines. His passion is teaching and sharing his knowledge in Photograpy and has been doing this for 6 years.
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16 responses to “Awesome Cold Look With CTO Gel And Tweaking White Balance”
Nice effect. I had a similar effect doing light painting with steel wool under city lights. When correcting white balance the steel wool became blue and it was pretty nice actually
Indeed! :)
Good tips.. thank you!!
Sharing is Caring :)
Very cool, think I will try this for one day for my Selfie 365 project
post it here how it looks :) would love to see the result
Nice tip, i’m going to try this out this weekend.
I got a huge booklet of Gels from a local Audio Visual company. So if anyone doesn’t want to buy some I would start there.
OK… how? :)
I would search Audio Visual or lighting event companies in your city and give them a call. I actually got two packs from them. They’re happy to give them away. Just say you are working on a project and need some gels.
Thanks!
per the Rosco website:
Rosco re-sellers, the retailers and production facilities who sell color and correction filters, will be happy to give you a swatchbook free. They cannot, however, mail them, so you need to go to the store or facility in person.
Thanks for the comment! :)
would this work going the other way? flashing with blue gels and then bringing it back to make the sky and everything oranger? not really practical, but might be fun to mess with
I have played with the other direction a little. You can add more orange to a sunset and gives everything that caste. I plan to play with it more later.
Yes you can. Set you WB to 10000 K, full CTB on the flash, -2 on the ambient, and a Daylight to Tungsten filter on the lens. Makes the background a nice sepia color. And they said that color filters were not useful on digital.
hhmm.. will try it just to see.