Easy 3 Light Home Photography Studio Portraits Using Color Gels

In this video, I’m going to show you how to set up easy 3 light home photography studio portraits using color gels. You will learn how to select your color gels. Also, you will see how to position your light modifiers in a small space so you get the best lighting on your subject. Don’t worry if you have a small space, it’s going to work for you.

Home Photography Studio Portraits Using Color Gels

Hope you enjoyed the behind the scenes and the photos. This is a series on shooting in a small home photography studio. Today we’re going to use color gels. That being said, no matter what lighting setup you want to try, you can adapt it to the size of your home studio. Be open to adjusting your vision. Now show you how I enjoyed making my space work. Be sure to stay at the end. I’ll show you how to change the modifyers and where I use red gels and purple and teal gels.

Decide what color gels you want to use.

If you don’t know what colors you’d like to use for your gels. Something like teal and orange is common. What I like to do is I like to use Adobe Color and and that’s at color.adobe.com. And I looked up the hex code for Teal. So this middle color here is teal. You can click through these and see what the different combinations you can get.

So based on this, what I plan to do for my shoot is going to have three setups. One is going to be teal and orange you have teal and orange right here. The next one is going to be teal and purple. And the last setup is all red gels.

Camera Settings And Ambient Light Considerations.

.I have a 70 square foot space that I’m using. It’s actually my living room. The first thing you should do is to block out all the incoming light from the outside. Close your blinds, curtains, anything to make your room as dark as possible.

So before you start shooting this is something you should do so that you’re controlling the ambient light that’s coming in. So my camera settings are ISO 100, shutter speed 200. My F stop is F4 and I’m using a Canon 24105 F Four lens. The aperture on this particular lens only goes down to F4, but that’s still a good aperture to choose. Its going to give you a good range of focus for my camera. I’m using a Canon 5D mark three.

Now that you have your camera settings and all the ambient light shut out, you can use the modeling lamps on your strobe lights as a preview of the final results using color gels.

Add Rim Lights

I added my rim lights with color gels angled about 45 degrees behind the subject. Camera left and camera right. I worked with the background lights first, then added the key light. Take advantage of your modeling lamp to help you to see a preview of your lights and try to get the angle you want. For my strobe lights I’m using the Paul C Buff alien bees. This is a B800 and the power output that I’ve been using is about 1/16th. Of course, that’s going to be different for your strobe light.

My modifiers are silver inside, and I’m using the Paul C Buff 64 inch silver umbrella. I like it because it gives the added specular punch. And with the gels, you get that colour pop as the rim lights. Because I’m using gels, this is the seven inch standard reflector that is attached to my alien bees. And for these lights this reflector is going to work well.

You can tape the gel on the outside of the reflector or you can use a rubber band to attach it. You can use most any gels. You can use the Rosco gels, but for this particular light and reflector this size works well. The way you have your lights position is going to be important if your vision is to have a black background, you might want to position the lights and the model so that they are not too close to the background. If possible, you don’t want color spill on the background.

I made the choice of using the Savage fashion grey seamless background paper. But now for me this is where I had to adjust my vision. Because of limited space I could not move the lights. And the subject far enough away to get a completely black background and no color spill. But that’s OK because the colors Bill could look nice in the background and you can make the background darker in post.

It’s important to direct your subject during a shoot. Maybe you might want to mark a spot on the floor so your subject and stay in a certain place after you set up your lights. You can have your model turn in different directions to get more or less of each of the color gels.

Add Your Key Light

I chose a 22-inch white high output beauty dish. That’s so I can control the amount of light that was spreading out in my frame. When using gels you don’t want too much light to get on a subject because it will cancel out.

The color color gels are mainly going to be seen in the shadow areas you want the key light just bright enough to tone down the color. In this case I was trying for most of the color to be in the shadows and not so much color taking over the face. In order to focus the color, I attached a grid to the beauty dish. I put a grid on the beauty dish because I knew I had to control the spread of the light, especially on the background.

Final Results

So here’s the final results of the shoot. Starting from camera left. Here is my rim light with the teal gel. On camera right is my rim light with orange gel. And here’s my key light with a 22 inch beauty dish and grid. Even though I’m using the modeling lamps for the preview, I’m still using the strobes. The modeling lamps are used as a preview for my results.

I kept my power outputs for my rim lights at about 1/16th power. My key light was slightly over 1/16 power. As a bonus, you can use this atmospheric aerosol. So when you spray this into the color gels, it creates this fog and it just adds a different type of mood to the photographs. Does better in gels.

Before I let you guys go I’m gonna leave you with a couple of different photographs using this color gel set up. One with the a red theme, a purple and teal theme and also using the beauty dish. Thank you guys for watching and enjoy the photographs.

Here is the link to my photography website ▶️ https://www.charlescabreraphotography.com

Check out the previous blog article ▶️ https://charlescabrera.com/photoshop-quick-mask-tutorial/