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Tips on using red gels


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Ive used them before (mostly with Clog) but always felt they needed alot of extra work in post to get a real crimson, deep, saturated red.

 

I believe I've always just used the Lee "party gel" red we have in house.

 

Is it possible to get deeper, more saturated reds through gels in camera?

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Here we go. This is a lighting test I did for my last film. As the photo indicates, that's an ARRi 650w at full flood gelled with the Lee 789. I don't think I had it hooked up to a dimmer.

 

Also, take note that this was taken with my iPhone 4S because I was in a rush. It looks ten times better on film.

 

post-45-0-34286000-1452299475_thumb.jpg

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Ive used them before (mostly with Clog) but always felt they needed alot of extra work in post to get a real crimson, deep, saturated red.

 

I believe I've always just used the Lee "party gel" red we have in house.

 

Is it possible to get deeper, more saturated reds through gels in camera?

 

As with any gel, getting a more saturated color comes with underexposure. If you're placing colored gels on the lamps and then exposing as per your meter, you're not going to see saturated colors. You really need to be underexposing by at least a couple of stops to see deep saturation.

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I think one of the tricky things about super-saturated red in the digital world is that there are so few bits allocated to the color especially after compression for delivery that inevitably you're going to have a lot of aliasing artifacts. So that may be one reason you don't see it very often. This is less of an issue when it's only used in a small part of the frame like this:

 

post-5721-0-72973000-1452311872_thumb.jpeg

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The same is also marginally true to film-- though it's mostly because red is the softest layer in stock, if memory serves. Generally; if you have a fully red scene in a film it'll look--- wrong--ish-- and soft-ish. It's often best to have a bit of white somewhere 'round to get some contrast to the red.

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