From Ordinary to Extraordinary: Quick and Easy Photography Tricks Using Gels

this video is all about gelling and there's two focuses here number one I want you to understand how gelling your lights can take your image from ordinary to extraordinary in any scene and number two I want to give you an intuitive framework to understand what the gel is going to do to a scene without actually having to test it out and try it let's get into it [Music] hello my friends my name is Pai welcome to another magma tutorial and welcome to Laguna Beach let's get straight into this I'm going to walk you through our setup what we're about to do we're going to start with the gear first but I do want to make introductions so this is our lovely couple varsha and Chris they're actually my clients that were cool enough to come out and do this for us so thank you guys for being here we have Veronica and she is going to be holding the Pro Photo B10 so for this the first thing you need is obviously an off-camera flash we're going to be using the profoto B10 because we're going to modify it and we're going to put a gel on so whenever you're doing that and you're working in kind of bright outdoor conditions like right now it's still three four hours before Sunset we need a lot of power so this is a 500 watt second strobe you don't need to be using profoto but if you're using something like say 8200s make sure that you have two of them now let's talk about the gear of course I'm holding the circular gels and that means that I'm using the mag box Pro so we'll be using the magma Pro 24 OCTA and I'm going to go ahead and set this guy up right now that's kind of a big deal if you've done photography for a while it was quick right that's what I'm saying all right and uh we're gonna go ahead and just zip on the diffuser and we're going to slide it all the way down there we go before I actually start modifying what I want to do is take a test shot or I'm going to just shoot natural light so we have something to compare against then we're going to add flash and I'm going to show you how to modify that flash so let's do that now why don't you hold these gels for a minute and Veronica I'm going to have you actually step out of the scene first because I want to show you the camera setup and get a natural light image so we have something to kind of compare against so right now my Canon R5 is set up just on a tripod you don't need to be on a tripod I just want it on there for comparison purposes so that way we can compare the exact same image across the set for the shot I'm going to have varsha and Chris look at each other I'm at 1 200 F14 and ISO 400 just again so I'm just going to vary ISO I'm not going to kind of adjust anything else this is the natural light image right here with them looking at each other and now you see the overall composition the first thing when gelling is we kind of need to under expose a bit so that we can get more detail more but we need more of a sky right it can't just be like bright white or even like there's not a lot of details in these clouds so what we're going to do first is I'm going to adjust the exposure down just going to like say low ISO 1 200 of a second and F14 and we're going to get this shot so why don't we do just a shot with natural flash meaning like flash that's not modified with a gel so I'm gonna have Veronica step in and uh we're gonna fire that flash off right onto them here now we have this dramatic image but of course you go well Veronica's still in the shot right again another benefit of having this on a tripod is well Veronica come out I can do a plate shot now I'm just going to turn off the remote so it doesn't fire and now I have a very easy play shot that I can just layer and in Photoshop it's 10 seconds to mask out Veronica and the light so comparing this now this was our natural light image this is the underexposed image where now we have tons of detail in these shadows and the scenes look so cool now let's modify the color I have three gels that I love to use when it comes to modifying kind of this environmental color it's a green an orange and a blue I'm going to show you all three of these and we're going to start with the orange these gels I'm working with by the way is part of the corrective Color Kit and along the way I'm going to give you an intuitive way of thinking about how they work and what we'll do is we'll use the half color so we're going to use the half CTO or the half orange we'll use the half blue the half grain one of the reasons again we want a 500 watt second strobe is once we add a gel it's going to lower the power output so the softbox already did that the gel is going to do the same thing now you don't need to undo the diffuser the Magma Team has thought of everything so you just unzip it you pop in your gel snap it in place and you are good to go zip that guy up let's go ahead and have you pop back into that spot we're going to go full power now again and you'll see a little bit of light reduction so here is the intuitive part of understanding what this light is going to do right now we put an orange gel onto the light I'm going to take the shot they're looking at each other boom I've currently left my white balance where it was when we started I left it at 6000 Kelvin right what we just did is we put orange light onto our subjects so what would we do if we're adding orange light if we're warming up our subjects then what would we do in like say editing to correct for that well we would cool down the image we'd cool it down by bringing the temperature down right and that's exactly what we're going to do in camera when we added a CTO gel or a half CTO we made the light orange when we put an orange light onto our subjects we had to correct for that by cooling it down right because we added blue because we cool it down it shifts the entire scene blue and then our subjects look like they're lit by a normal color light because we're compensating for that and that's the trick see if we switch to say a green gel so if I put green light onto my subjects what would you do in the editing room well when something is tinted green then we would typically add magenta to it right you're going to do the same thing here but we're going to do it in camera so if I add green to them and then I shift magenta to compensate for that green color the entire Scene goes purple same thing with a blue if I put a blue gel into that and I put blue light on them what do you have to do you have to warm it up right and then warming it up the entire scene is going to get warm and they're going to be the right color based on that compensation now look what we did with this scene so here's the natural light image and then at the same Kelvin here's the image that was shot underexposed with flash that's already a huge change but then look at the image just shot with flash with the 24 Pro OCTA and then once we start adding gels to it to modify the scene each gel completely changes the overall look and The Light Within a scene and that gives you a lot of creative control to play I'm hoping that this kind of framework of understanding what these gels are doing is also intuitive for you that you can walk away and go okay if I put a gel that's blue on there I know exactly what that's going to do because I have to compensate by warming up my subject which is going to warm the entire scene I'm going to get orange I hope you all enjoy the tutorial we're going to link up all the gear that we use in the description of the video and if you guys have comments thoughts what you guys would like to learn next time comment on the video I read all of your guys's thoughts and I get a lot of my ideas from them so it really helps out a lot I'll see you guys in the next video peace

Channel: MagMod

Views: 20,015

Keywords: MagMod, MagGrip, MagGel, MagGrid, MagSnoot, MagBounce, MagSphere, MagnetMod, Speedlight, Speedlite, Flash, Canon, Photography, Modifier, Magnets, Magnet, Magnetic, Nikon, Olympus, Fuji, Camera, Digital, DSLR, off camera flash

Id: orXj94lJvUo

Length: 7min 5sec (425 seconds)

Published: Wed Jun 07 2023