Using Colored Gels in Beauty Photography

photography, colors, blue, model, fashion, beauty
Colors on Tish
In this post, we are going to discuss how to set up a fashion and beauty shot like this one.

There are a lot of moving parts, and I will try to cover them all.  If you have any questions, comment below and I'll do my best to clarify anything that was left out.

Tools

Let's start with the tools need to create this image.  Here is a picture of all the 'out of the ordinary' equipment we used.  It includes:

  1. Lensbaby Composer Pro with Sweet 50 Optic
  2. A decent size piece of glass
  3. Cling wrap
  4. Color gels (we used Steel Blue and Amber from Rosco.



How We Did It

First thing we did was use THIS color calculater and find a color combination we liked.  After we had the colors, we searched through our collection of gels to find the closest colors.  We had on hand Rosco Apricot and Rosco Steel Blue gels, so we went with those.  From these colors we created 'gel-packs', layers of gels put together so as to be easier to use.  There is nothing worse than trying to tape three to four gels to a light at the same time.  Our gel-packs looked like this:

  1. heat shield on the bottom,
  2. then we added a .6 neutral density filther,
  3. then we added a single layer of either Apricot or Steel blue.
In the end, we made three gel-packs of each color.

Next, we set up our lights like this:


We chose to use the steel blue color for the main light and let the edge lighting be a hot orange.  The foreground element was a piece of cling wrap stuck to a piece of glass,, which looked like this.  You will notice we aimed a light at the cling wrap.  That is how the bokeh got that nice blue tone to it.

And there you have it.  A quick look into how we created that image above.  Feel free to comment below, or send us a quick note to say 'Hi'.



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