[Music] a very very start Monday overs of the let's take a look at the latest radar Valley down the morning over Hampshire [Music] and as cinematographers normally we focus our attention on the quality of light and sometimes we Overlook one very important aspect which which is the color and the color relationship between our light sources every setup that you saw in the intro of the video was actually shot at night and the lighting was recreated artificially in each and every shot what allowed me to achieve what I think is a believable look for each time of day was the careful use of different color temperatures and mixed color temperatures to reproduce how light looks in real life learning to mix and use different color temperatures is is a great way to step up your photography it allows cinematographers not only to recreate different times of day and have consistent lighting over a long period of time but also make the viewer feel a certain way creating images which could range from a true to life representation of light all the way to more stylized realities So today we're going to dive deep within the subject of color temperature mixed lighting and subsequent camera settings so that you can start thinking about lighting in a more nuanced way when it comes to color so first let's analyze the characteristics of natural light during different times of day by doing so even with observation only we soon discovered that without clouds natural light for the majority of the day is actually a mixed source with the sun being a hardlight source and the sky acting like a softer dimmer and cooler Source but what's the actual difference in color temperature between the two during a clear sunny day well let's measure it we can do this with a colar meter or we can point the camera at a white surface or a white balance card and the camera's custom white balance function will tell us the colar temperature of the light falling on the card so first I did this with the direct sunlight and it measured 5600 Kelvin and then I did the same thing this time in the shade and by doing so I was actually measuring the sky color temperature and it came in at a much cooler color Tamp of 9,200 Kelvin which it's not surprising if you think that a clear blue sky well looks blue so it will sit pretty high on the Kelvin scale and by keeping this difference between the two sources in mind and setting up our lights accordingly with a hard Source accompanied by a softer and much cooler one we can go from something that looks like this to this to this which in my opinion sells the look much better and makes the viewer believe that the scene was taking place late in the morning even though it was actually shot at 1: p.m. other times of day require different color contrast between the two sources like this late afternoon look where I lower the position of the hard light representing the sun reduced it color temperature to 3,200 Kelvin and reduced the color temperature gap between the two sources to better represent how natural light behaves and looks at that time of day so we have the Sun at 3,200 Kelvin and the soft light representing the sky at 4,000 while the white balance of the camera was kept at 5600 Kelvin other times of day again require only one light source if we want to replicate a cloudy day for example or when the sun is below the horizon line at dawn or Dusk and we can easily recreate them with only one soft light source I also tried to replicate a sort of dawn dusk look where the sun is just below the horizon line and it colors it of a very warm Hue and I did it with the amaran f21c and f22c and mixing a very cool color T of 13,000 Kelvin coming from the m on f22c and a very warm one with the f21c of 2,300 Kelvin both going through the same diffusion frame as a comparison this is the one color temperature D look and this is the mixed lighting one and I think the experiment worked and uh I have to say I like them both also a quick note if you like the look and feel of the images that you saw in the intro of this video I graded them using my new Kodak 500t power grade actually I just applied the power grade I didn't really do any type of grading per se cuz I worked very hard in the past 2 years to develop processes and techniques to accurately profile film for the color transformation in the power grade I used scattered data interpolation to map the codc 500t Motion Picture film stock all across the exposure range both in terms of contrast and color rendition so that basically it turns your digital footage into a senon negative scan of the film stock to which a custom 2383 film print is applied I really believe there's nothing quite like it on the market so I am very excited it's finally out and if you want to check it out and find out more about my profiling process you can head over to film- match.com now I don't know if you watched saltburn not going to spoil anything but as I was watching it one of the things that struck me the most was the painterly depth and color contrast within each and every frame and it didn't come as a surprise who the cinematographer was the one and only lenus sandrin as I was reading about the movie I stumbled across an interview on the American cinematographer with Mr sandrin and he said that throughout the movie he lit night Interiors with a combination of a warm key light and a very cool fill and to quote him he said we used a warm key light to create a warm atmosphere but without without a cooler fill it would have looked really monochrome having a very warm light with a really cold light as a fill helps the perception of depth and color for the viewer the whole image just somehow looks rich and white balanced even though it's full of color with this method we got a more stylized KN interior look this isn't anything new and he's certainly not the first one to do this but it's definitely a component of his style and we can see the injection of blue tones in the shadows across different movies that Mr sanren shot so how do we recreate this look well first we got to understand how much color contrast we actually need to sell the effect as I was experimenting I discovered an interesting behavior of our visual system basically our eyes and cameras too for that matter don't react to changes in color temperature equally across the range this goes back to the basics of color temperature and white balance but with a Twist how a source with a certain color temperature is rendered depends on the camera's white balance setting if you have a light set to 3,000 Kelvin and you set the camera to 3,000 Kelvin well of course that light will be rendered as white and if you set the camera a th000 Kelvin de higher so 4,000 you will warm up that light source as you're telling the camera that 4,000 is white and anything lower than that will be rendered as progressively warmer but take a look at what happens if we do the same thing but at a higher Kelvin temperature now both the light and the camera are set to 6,000 Kelvin and just like before we get white light but as we increase the camera's white balance to 7,000 Kelvin we don't get nearly as much of a warming effect even though the difference in kelvin between the light and the camera is the same as the previous example why does this matter well apart from the fact that we now know that any change in the lower region of the Kelvin scale will have a greater effect compared to any change in the higher portion of the scale it makes us understand that if you have only one light source or multiple sources that are at the same temperature we can render them pretty much however we want by changing the camera white balance but if we want to create color contrast by rendering warm and cool colors at the same time the difference in color temperatures between the lights will need to be greater than you might think so how did I go from here to here I have an amaran f21c with a grid set at 2,700 Kelvin matching the color Temp and augmenting the stove lights and the camera is also matching the same color temperature which means that the light produced by these two sources will be effectively rendered as white now since I want these lights to be rendered very warm I will raise the color temperature of the camera until the sources look nice and warm to my taste and obviously there is no rule it's matter of taste here I landed at a camera white balance of 5600 Kelvin now let's add our cool night fill into the equation we have an aperture LS 60x outside the windows set it 6,500 Kelvin and an amaran f22c as a fill inside the kitchen matching it in color temperature and as we turn them on you can see that our nightfill is not nearly as cool as we needed to be so we're got to make it cooler and we can do so by bringing down the white balance of the camera to 3,200 Kelvin now the fill light is starting to get there but but by doing so we are losing the nice warm tones coming from the key and the Practical so we have two ways to go about it we either keep the camera at the new white balance setting and lower even further the color temperature of the Practical and the key to let's say 2300 Kelvin or we go back to the previous settings and increase the color temperature of the fill light until we land where we want since most of the times it's harder to control the color of practicals and as in this case I can control the color of my key but I cannot control the color of the stove lights I find myself using the second approach more often where I just bump up the temperature of the cool fill so instead of tweaking the camera setting I'm going to leave it at 5,600 Kin I'm going to gel the aperture LS 60x outside the window with a full CTB gel to get a color temperature of 13,000 Kelvin and since the amaran f22c is a full color RGB light I can use the cus link app and use the extended CCT mode which allows me to increase the color temperature up to 20,000 Kelvin and match the 13,000 Kelvin so to recap we have our practical and key at 2,700 Kelvin the camera set 5,600 Kelvin and the cool fill set to 13,000 Kelvin no matter which one of the two approaches we choose we are essentially doing the same thing in both scenarios we are increasing the separation between our sources to obtain a pronounced color contrast that wouldn't be possible with a limited CCT range so we either have to use gels or full colors RGB lights and this is where the amaran f22c and f21c really shine aperture did send them to me but they didn't tell me what to say or any of that I actually reached out to them to ask if I could try them out and they said yes and after having used them for a couple of months I honestly don't think I'm ever going back to by color lights it's just so easy to use them and so easy to match the color of practicals in every single scenario and they're super super bright I used them on a short recently and granted I kept the whole thing very moody so I purposely didn't need a ton of exposure but I played them at like 1% the whole time and by the way you can see here as well I used a warm cool contrast between the sources one motivated by the table lamp and one replicating the light coming from the TV they performed super super well the only thing I would like to see aperture adding in a future software update is the possibility to control the lights with chromaticity coordinates through the app which is something that we see on their PR line full RGB lights like the MC Pro and it would make color matching even easier but apart from that I don't think I ever fell in love with a piece of equipment this quickly so thank you aperture for sending them over in terms of the brightness of the cool fill when it comes to injecting Blu tones in the shadows I feel like it can be easy easily overdone and it can kill the lowkey mood of the image altogether it's always a matter of balance between the key and the fill so I always start at like 1% and increase it very slowly until it looks right this was all for today if you like this video please like share and subscribe and until next time bye
