color temperature isn't just a technical function to make a pleasing looking image knowing how it works can inform the feelings you want to convey in your scene and how your audience perceives them knowing how to use color temperature in your image can be broken down into three different approaches Recreation modification and exaggeration and by breaking these ideas down into different times of day we can simplify the process of deciding how a scene should [Music] look the Kelvin scale shows us average color temperatures emitted by the light sources we're most familiar with but it's not as simple as selecting just one of these temperatures to use in an image there's more to Mid a sunlight for example than a single temperature the Sun a white light is surrounded by Blue Sky this is caused by the Earth's atmosphere scattering blue and violet waves from the sunlight and you can see the effect of the Blue Sky wherever the sun is blocked in the Shadows on the Kelvin scale this can be anywhere from 8,000 Kelvin upwards depending on weather conditions and time of day with this in mind we now know how to make this midday sunlight more realistic by layering some cooler Sky underneath it for this cooler Sky we used a 4x4 frame with some bleached muslin material attached raised above our window and fired a Forza 60c 55° reflector attached into it set to 9,000 Kelvin [Music] for our sun we Ed the forza 500 B2 with its compatible frenel attachment raised up above the window at a steep angle to mimic the height of a midday sun set to 5,600 [Music] Kelvin to further this realism we're trying to capture we could also add some more light to represent the Sun hitting elements outside of the window the ground especially so we set up a 720b with its 55° reflector dish and bounced it from the wooden decking outside of the window much like how the real Sun at the angle of our 500b would be interacting with the environment [Music] with knowledge of color temperature at our disposal we can determine a time of day to present the mood or feelings we want the scene to convey was providing a sense of realism to the image but what if we don't want to be bound quite so tightly by the laws of nature first we need to take a look at Sunrise or sunet at Sunrise and sunet sunlight has to travel through more atmosphere to reach us so even more rays are scattered giving us the warmer temperatures found at these times of day however you'll still find a lot of blue in the sky furthest away from the sun the sun is slightly dimmer and the blue in the sky is darker and more saturated you may see more Vivid color contrasts at these times here we've used color temperature to recreate sunset realistic to our location when real Sunset falls into this room we only really see the warmer elements of sunlight affecting the space the sun itself the warmer Sky near the Sun and bounce from reflective surfaces Outdoors any cooler Color cast from the blue sky has very little effect due to it being primarily above and at the back of the house combined with the decco of warmer walls bouncing the warm even Evening Sun around the room we have a relatively monotone warm temperature throughout the space so when it came to recreating this light we just needed to focus on three elements the sun the sky and outside elements reflecting the sun and the resulting bounce light around the [Music] room we did this with a Forza 500 B2 frenel attached firing in through the window set to a color temperature approximating the sun's at this time of day 3,200 Kelvin for the surrounding sky and outdoor bounce we set up a 6x6 frame of bleached muslin with a Forza 720b 55° reflector dish attached shooting through it set to 3,200 kin also for the indoor bounce light we simply bounced a Forza 60c from a she of bleached muslin material set to a slightly cooler color temperature of 4,200 K we decided to cool this spill light down a little just so our image isn't too flat color-wise so far we've shown two examples where color temperature has been used in a strict realistic way but in cinema light is often used to bend realism to our will to create moods we might not be able to capture using only natural light and since we've recreated natural light once again we have the tools to tweak it to our benefit and even a subtle change can give our scene a different feeling or meaning we simply change the color temperature of our bounced ambients cooling it right down to 20,000 Kelvin in doing this we've allowed our audience to subconsciously feel a closer emotional pool to darker and sadder feelings as opposed to our more realistic temperature balance which might not feel so Melancholy and although the combination quality and positioning of these two different color temperatures are something we may never find naturally in this particular room we know these temperatures can naturally exist together outside of it so we've simply borrowed a piece of reality to create our own so what if we took this a step further using realistic color temperatures but putting them in an exaggerated situation we would never see with our own eyes Moonlight is actually found at around 4,000 Kelvin on the Kelvin scale though we may recognize it as a much cooler color this is because Moonlight is a byproduct of sunlight reflected from the moon's grayish surface making it about 400,000 times dim dimer than sunlight and being so dark the light receptors in our eyes shift to a different type of cell to adap one that only picks up the blue end of the color spectrum with this information we can start to understand why this setup feels a little exaggerated a typical warm household bulb can generally be between 2,700 and 3,200 Kelvin so we'll start with a table lamp a pavol TC inside set to 2,700 Kelvin we need exposure and shape on the face so we set up a pavos slim 12C to the character's right with its softbox and grid set to the same color temperature as our bulb at 2,700 Kelvin in reality our lamp would like be lighting more of the face and room so we also set up a pavos slim 240c soft box attached this is also set to 2,700 Kelvin to complete the motivated light from the lamp now we could start adding warm accent or backlights into the image to complete the look of a nighttime interior but we're going to opt for something more stylistic we used the forza FC 60b with the compatible PJ fz60 projection attachment directed into a concentrated hard light through the window door in the background and onto the back wall this light is set to 6,500 kelv creating a warm cool color contrast in the image and representing how moonlight looks to our eyes to tie this Moonlight into the image a little better we added another pavos slim 12C softbox and grid attached to our character's left and slightly behind also set to 6,500 Kelvin this gives us a subtle Edge light blending the Moonlight into the scene a little more making the image feel more real but what's real about this image the reason we perceive Moonlight as blue is because it's so dark which means in reality we generally don't see lamp light and Moonlight together it's either one or the other so this could be seen as a failure to light the scene naturally but we're not always trying to recreate reality perfectly in an image recreating reality is just one option to capture the emotions we might want to instill with our image and if these color temperatures don't carry in a mood we want to convey we can modify them or we can exaggerate them to really push the ideas and feelings of the scene or story in every instance we borrowed from reality to create our own and that's the essence of lighting for Cinema recreating modifying and exaggerating what we see every day to convey feelings and emotions in a visual capacity and color temperature is just one way that we can do this [Music]
