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Sodium / Mercury mix for night exteriors: Yellow/Gold + Cyan


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For a scene for an upcoming 40-minute film I'm tasked with lighting some night exteriors. From reading here and watching some examples I tend to like a (maybe not very realistic but) stylized Sodium look that is more yellow and gold rather than a very reddish rendering I often see on digital cameras.

I guess the task is to create this for digital capture. My Plan was to use 2x Multi-PAR lights (8x each) for general atmospheric back-lighting (I have them easily available, though at 2800K), shape it further on the close ups and get some color contrast with daylight balanced HMIs or even LEDs.

GOLD/YELLOW:
(There are a few alternatives I already found, interested in your opinions)

  • Khondji seems to like a mixture of 3200K Tungsten with 1/4 CTO and 1/4-1/2 plus green. 
    https://theasc.com/magazine/may05/interpreter/index.html
     
  • Hurlbut gets nice golden tones although I can't find lot's of information how: (Click, it's actuall not the HMI in the thumbnail, but in the middle section of the video
    image191.png
    image171.png

 

  • Of course there's everything from Lee & Rosco that says Sodium on it, but I have a feeling that 651 Low Sodium and everything with Apricot and Bastard Amber would be to red on digital, I guess I am aiming more towards Urban Sodium, Industrial Sodium, 1/2-1/2 Mustard Yellow although I fear that they might be too gritty instead of golden/yellow?

Am I completely off with testing straw and CTS instead of CTO or any reddish Sodium variant and combining it with green? 1/4-1/2 Plus Green seem to work fine? Could Sun Color Straw do both in one gel? I find it does on HMIs, slightly warming with a sometimes greenish shift?

 

CYAN/BLUEISH-GREEN:

assassination16.jpg

 

While I find the yellow-part difficult, David Mullen (see image above) suggested Lee 60 Cyan on a tungsten par can for cyan/blueish green, although with daylight units I guess one could just aim use more Green (+1/4, +1/2)? Shelly Johnson mentioned Lee 241 & 242 for Tungsten & Film, I guess going slower on the green if daylight balanced sources (more blue in the source spectrum) do the mercury vapor trick could help compared to using film and tungsten?

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There are so many different recipes for these color combinations. Roger Deakins apparently likes to use 1/2 CTO & Straw 013 on tungsten lamps for sodium. I've tried 1/2 CTO and 1/4 plus green, which I quite like, but it really depends on how gritty you want to go. Rosco Industrial Vapor looks great if that's the look you are after.

A lot is going to depend on your exposure, and how saturated you want the colors to be. Sodium always seems underexposed to me, so it's pretty saturated, whereas Mercury can be a lot brighter.

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12 hours ago, Stuart Brereton said:

There are so many different recipes for these color combinations.

And therefore many that are not created equal, and probably lack certain qualities therefore...

 

12 hours ago, Stuart Brereton said:

Roger Deakins apparently likes to use 1/2 CTO & Straw 013 on tungsten lamps for sodium. I've tried 1/2 CTO and 1/4 plus green, which I quite like, but it really depends on how gritty you want to go.

A lot is going to depend on your exposure, and how saturated you want the colors to be. Sodium always seems underexposed to me, so it's pretty saturated, whereas Mercury can be a lot brighter.

Thanks for the further input, I'm glad to hear that Going towards straw is not per-se a bad idea (if Deakins does it i guess), as it would be the first idea on how to get yellow. Dialing in green is really up to personal taste I guess.

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21 hours ago, Andreas Eymannsberger said:

And therefore many that are not created equal, and probably lack certain qualities therefore...

I don’t think it’s a question of right or wrong, it’s more about the needs of the show. If you are trying to match existing fixtures then your gel pack will be governed by achieving a certain color. If you’re not matching then you can choose a sodium color that you like, regardless of how accurate it is. I’ve tried many different combinations over the years, and some of them look great, but I’m not sure that any of them are particularly faithful to the actual rendition of a sodium lamp.

One thing I tried years ago was photographing sheets of white paper under various different vapor lamps, then looking at the RGB values and the histograms of the stills in photoshop. You can then compare them to the transmission graphs of the gels. It’s not an exact method, and a lot depends on the particular camera you are using, but it can help.

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I don't know if this helps at all, but...

Some years ago I attempted to make an incandescent bulb (~2700K) look like sodium lights. I did this just by using a grey card and my eyes, so it was not scientific or accurate. I ended up stacking Lee Bastard amber and Pale Yellow. With a different camera the results may look totally different. Anyhow, here are the results:

 high_pressure_sodium.jpg

Edited by Jan Sandvik
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