Lasse Pedersen Posted August 5, 2014 Share Posted August 5, 2014 Hi. Im trying to emulate the yellow light used in many resent movies. Im having a really hard time, im shooting on a blackmagic pocket cam. My light usually tuns out orange or brownish, but im really loving the yellow light. Some help please :) ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Premium Member Adrian Sierkowski Posted August 6, 2014 Premium Member Share Posted August 6, 2014 Well, which yellow light? If you're talking the hollywood blockbuster style light-- a lot of that is from color correction, primarily (there are tutorials in resolve for it, called the blockbuster look). But there are many yellow lights. Also the perception of a certain color will also depend highly on what other colors are around. For example, with yellow, if everything else is cyan/blue/tealish, the yellow will pop a lot more than it would if you were in say, a red room, or a white room. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Premium Member David Mullen ASC Posted August 6, 2014 Premium Member Share Posted August 6, 2014 Isn't this a color correction issue? You can shift orange to yellow by adding a bit of green. Brown is really just desaturated orange with a slight magenta bias. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lasse Pedersen Posted August 6, 2014 Author Share Posted August 6, 2014 This is what im talking about. http://terragon.tumblr.com/image/93945112950 Noticed it a lot in darius wolskis work. Mainly in prometheus, but i also saw that the new halo trailer also used the same look. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Premium Member Adrian Sierkowski Posted August 6, 2014 Premium Member Share Posted August 6, 2014 While I don't know the exact Gel used there, Look into Storaro Yellow-- Roscolux 2003. That's kinda honestly one of my personal go tos. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Premium Member Phil Rhodes Posted August 6, 2014 Premium Member Share Posted August 6, 2014 Yellow is tricky. If it isn't sufficiently saturated, it just looks like mixed colour temperature light. If it's oversaturated, it becomes very easy for it to swing wildly toward either orange, if it's a warm yellow, or green, if it's more of a lemon yellow. Actually curating a yellow hue through production design, photography, postproduction and exhibition to the point where it still looks like the yellow you had in mind is difficult, particularly in Rec. 709 video where the greens are not really good enough to define a decent yellow in concert with the much more deeply saturated reds. A theatrical lighting designer I once spoke to described yellows as "piss-coloured" and said he rarely used them on the basis that it just ends up looking like a poor-quality tungsten lamp on a dimmer. I am aware of two good ways to achieve powerful yellows that have a minimal tendency to go wrong. The first is to use night intelligent lights, moving heads, call them what you will. These often have either fixed filters among which is a yellow, or alternatively cyan/magenta/yellow colour mixing and when you can have it insert only the yellow filter. These are invariably glass dichroics and designed for narrow spectral characteristics and high saturation to increase the impact of a night club's lightshow. Some of the apparent impact of this is probably psychosomatic, since they use discharge light sources (including, sometimes, HMI) and the yellow light contrasts with the cool white of the unfiltered beam. This is, of course, another trick: don't just use yellow, but contrast it with blue, as has already been mentioned. The other way is LEDs. You are intrinsically mixing red and green to achieve a good yellow with most colour-mixing LEDs, but that's often OK because the green can be quite deep and permits the creation of a colour with minimal tendency to go orange. Yellow-emitting LEDs do exist but tend to be rather orangish, and in any case I've never seen a lighting device that's specifically and only designed to emit yellow light (you could probably build one easily enough). Caveats: Night club lighting of any type, whether discharge or LED powered, is likely to be fan-cooled and will require a DMX lighting controller to work (a few have the ability to do basic things from a control panel on the light). That said it's a lot easier to get this sort of theatrical, club or event lighting from local rental places worldwide and it's much cheaper than film and TV stuff. Simple colour control of an intelligent lighting device can be taught in a few minutes, it isn't complex. Most discharge light sources used in this sort of thing will be iron ballasted, so no hot restrike and no flicker free operation, although some manufacturers specifically make "TV" versions with high frequency ballasts, which probably still lack hot restrike but shouldn't flicker. Local rental companies probably won't have those versions. The big problem with this is that both the techniques I mention rely on creating a colour (yellow, in this case, but whatever you want really) with very limited spectral characteristics, and a high level of saturation that isn't often found in nature. Due to metamerism (look it up) of both human eyes and cameras, this can have strange and unexpected effects on various aspects of production design and will need to be carefully evaluated. P Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Stephen Murphy Posted August 6, 2014 Share Posted August 6, 2014 Try Lee 101 yellow Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lasse Pedersen Posted August 6, 2014 Author Share Posted August 6, 2014 Here is a example on the yellow light i want to achive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw2oqtZoc8s BTW what about whitebalance ? Im shooting on a Blackmagic cineam pocket cam. Which white balance is recommended to use ? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Premium Member Phil Rhodes Posted August 6, 2014 Premium Member Share Posted August 6, 2014 Balance to the white light (or, on a Blackmagic camera, select whichever colour temperature is correct for the light), then put the yellow filter over it. P Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Premium Member Adrian Sierkowski Posted August 6, 2014 Premium Member Share Posted August 6, 2014 WB all depends on how you want it to look. In the Halo clip they probably were at a 3200K balance with uncorrected 5600K fixtures and of course your yellow. Personally on the BM cameras I tend to balance at 4500K and then i'd add a little blue to any tungsten heads I wanted white, or a little orange to any daylights. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lasse Pedersen Posted August 6, 2014 Author Share Posted August 6, 2014 Thanks for so many responses :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Premium Member Phil Rhodes Posted August 6, 2014 Premium Member Share Posted August 6, 2014 That shot in the Halo trailer looks like it might be yellow-emitting fluorescent tubes. Looks a bit like a location; maybe they swapped out the existing tubes? P Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Premium Member Satsuki Murashige Posted August 7, 2014 Premium Member Share Posted August 7, 2014 I second the call for Yellow 101 gel, safe bet. Never tried Storaro Yellow but I suspect it's similar, just more saturated? Depending on the camera, you run the possibility of clipping the red and green channels with a gel that is too color saturated, which would limit your ability to bring back detail in post. So it's better to err on the side of under-saturating the color channels as you can always push the color a bit in post. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Premium Member Adrian Sierkowski Posted August 7, 2014 Premium Member Share Posted August 7, 2014 I haven't ever had a trouble clipping on SY. But yes, it is much more saturated. I like it because i often will be using a light diffusion filter, which will knock down some of that sat. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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