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I’m curious, what were some lighting methods (before LED and bi-color lights) that were used to shoot in an environment that rested in the 4300k range? Like an office building, a warehouse with those mixed fluorescent lights, etc.
I had an impromptu shoot recently in this situation, and only had access to a daylight LED to key a talking head. It was a quick and dirty shoot, but I ended up just white balancing in between around 4800-5000k. So the background read a little bit warm, and the face of the subject a little bit cool. It felt less jarring than a very warm background to me.
What else can be done here with single-color temp lights? Would just using unbleached muslin on a daylight source help get closer? Or are we talking using gels in this world?
Wondering about more “legacy” techniques here that would be useful, without relying on bi-color lights or modern color grading techniques like masking the background. Thanks!
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Any lighting package should always contain some CTO, CTB, Plus-Green, and Minus-Green gels even if just in scraps.
Whether you used HMIs or tungsten with gels, or Kinos, with or without gels, just depended on the situation, the scale of the shot, your lighting package, etc. Keep in mind that you generally lose more output shifting tungsten towards daylight with blue gels than you do shifting HMIs towards tungsten with orange gels, plus HMIs are already more energy-efficient. So for a larger space where you are aiming for balancing to a Cool White fluorescent color (more like 4700K with some green), you would be more likely to use HMIs than tungsten. However in a small space, you might try tungsten with gels (the color tends to be “richer” from gelled tungsten in some ways but that is subjective.)
If you have to get closer to 3200K, then tungsten makes more sense (and HMIs gelled to 3200K never look quite right to my eyes compared to tungsten.)
There are too many variables to give you a definitive answer. My only caveat is that I tend to avoid mixing techniques for whatever the key light is on the face, I wouldn’t use gelled HMIs in one spot and then gelled tungsten in another for a key (fill or backlight is less critical.)
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