Paul C. Buff, Inc. Technical Forum

I'm about to launch into some coloured rim-lighting and I'd like to know what folks do about metering in the presence of gel'ed light.

For argument let's assume I want the rim light to be 1 stop below the key. Do you meter, say, a deep blue light at the subject's shoulder, and then apply a correction factor to the meter reading to make it comparable to the full-spectrum key?

Maybe I'm overthinking this, but I want to avoid the rim lights being blown out or just too dominant and I don't want to revert to the old shoot'n'chimp'n'repeat cycle.

Thanks!

An incident meter reading is what it is. The listed correction factor no longer matters. The factor would come into play if you knew the correct meter reading without the gel, then added the gel. You would factor the correction based on the un-gelled light.

I would suggest, however, testing your meter with gels. Meter white light, meter the gelled light, and see how close the gelled meter reading comes to the un-gelled meter reading and correction factor. test w a few gels across the spectrum (red, blue, green, etc).

Okay, thank you. No getting away from good old fashioned tinkering, I guess. ;)