Urgent help required: shooting red lights

nicknackgtb

Hi people,

I am doing a shoot but having trouble with white balance and red lights. The room is lit up red and want to capture the red but it looks orange. How do you white balance properly to capture red lights properly??

Cheers

copacetic

You should do as normal but tilt your white card to catch some of the red light. Camera should then adjust for the red cast making it appear white. Other colours should appear correct then also.

However I'm not sure that's what you are looking for. The above may be what you are doing and it's adjusting out the red. If you want everything to appear reddish, then white balance in a different room.

AnonoBoy

White balance before you turn the red lights on if you aren't doing that already.

You can always adjust the colour afterwards in the edit to make it seem more red.

FreezeUp

Or use the appropriate gel / screening on the lights.

FreezeUp

AnonoBoy wrote: »

You can always adjust the colour afterwards in the edit to make it seem more red.

But if he's filming orange now...

NealB

Use a full red filter on your lens, no need to gel lights.

AnonoBoy

NealB wrote: »

Use a full red filter on your lens, no need to gel lights.

That'll make absolutely everything red though. If he gels some lights he can get a bit better results by having some red and some white.

NealB

Yep, all red, looks cool, but if that's not the desired effect then it's clearly not going to do the trick.

You're really talking about the balance between the red gel lights and the white lights, and that's down to the lighting cameraman.

If you want to muck about with your Wh Bal you can spill red onto the card, but you’re removing the red from the entire image, including areas of the shot that are lit only by white.

I’d balance off the white and red gel up to the desired level. Using a monitor will take the guess work out of the equation.