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How to set up your lights and balance colour tones to get that orange and teal look in-camera

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The blue and orange look (also often referred to as “Orange and Teal”) has been popular in cinema for a long time, but massively so in the last few years as easy video editing and colour grading features have come into easy reach of anybody with a camera. With free editing software like DaVinci Resolve out there, it’s easy for anybody to do in post now. Shift the shadows one way, the highlights another and you’re good right?

Well, sort of, but not really. If you want to do it well, you also need to light your scene for it. In this video, cinematographers Valentina Vee and Alissa Rooney walk us through the lighting setup to shoot these colours together. They walk us through a full lighting breakdown, explaining how to balance the colour tones together to make them feel seamless throughout.

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Follow these five tips if you don’t want to suck at color theory

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Understanding color theory is one of the essential skills for photographers. It combines art and science and it’s what makes it so interesting, so complex… and so frustrating at times. If you want to be a good photographer, you don’t want to suck at color theory. And this video from Greg Gunn (The Futur Academy) offers five tips that will help you not to suck at it.

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Are you still chasing “perfect” colour?

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It’s my belief that colour is actually one of the most subjective elements that we as humans all understand, yet we actually have no real way of enforcing or translating it to one another.

Think of colour like a language. I may say the word ‘Red’ to you and you will have an idea of what I mean, but it’s still extremely vague.

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This comprehensive video helps you understand, achieve and utilize color balance

For all photographers and cinematographers, color temperature is one of the key areas to understand. If you’re new to it, it sounds complicated and overwhelming. But in this video from Kinetek, director and cinematographer Matthew Rosen will help you learn more about color temperature. You’ll learn how to understand it, and how to utilize it into your shots just the way you want.

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This is how Illuminati color meter can help you improve photos and videos

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From time to time, there are very interesting photography-related campaigns on Kickstarter. One of them is Illuminati, a wireless light and color meter for photography and filmmaking. It syncs with your smartphone to help you adjust the lights on set, measure white balance even in the trickiest situations and set your camera to take the color-correct shots.

There are a few benefits to using this gadget to improve your photography and videos. In his recent video, Jay P. Morgan gives you several reasons why you should use this color meter and how you can benefit from it.

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How to use curves to fix any colour problem!

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I had to shoot in an environment without HSS (Didn’t have my Citi600 with me) and I didn’t have my Hoya ND16 filter with me either. Which meant that I couldn’t effectively overpower the ambient light coming off the stage to get rid of the blue on the model’s skin.

This led me to trying a few solutions, albeit badly until Stefan Kohler hooked me up with this ridiculously simple and awesome solution for fixing colour problems while retaining all of the micro details in contrast etc (which you lose when you use Frequency Separation for low level skin etc).

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8-bit vs 16-bit – What Color Depth You Should Use And Why It Matters

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When going into an edit process there is much confusion about what color depth should one use. Some pieces of knowledge are more relevant than others and some are not relevant at all. Either way, the selection of color depth in which you edit will have a huge impact on the final editing result.

The purpose of this article is to try and clear up the confusion about bit depth and give you advice on what bit depth to choose when you edit and output your images.

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Ikea Hack: Warm Up LED Accent Lighting Using Photography Gels

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Installing new LED accent lighting or replacing your old energy wasting halogen under-cabinet lighting with new LED accent lights?  Notice that even the “warm white” LED lights are just a touch too white or a touch too harsh compared to the warm glow of the halogen lights you’re used to seeing?

Click the link for a simple way to warm up the look of LED accent lighting for less than $10 in less than two minutes by using photography gels.

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