Lamp rather than flash?

[Herve5]

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Given the current sensitivities we reach in low light, I often find myself in situations where, out of the camera and myself, I find the one needing more light to aim in the dark is me, rather than the Q which will imperturbably shoot at night with zero blur.

I have come to think, what I need rather than a bulky flash is just a lamp to look myself at what I'm composing (and, maybe more often, to compensate backlightings).

 

And so I tried. I now have one of these nice frontal LED lamps, that indeed allows me to compose and, to some extent, cleanup some backlightings.

My concern is, that lamp is a high-T white ('blue'), when the remaining low light is almost always low-T ('yellow'), which sometimes results in relatively bizarre dual-color shots.

 

Thus my questions:

- are some of you also using lamps instead of flashes?

- which models would you suggest?

- did you encounter the T color issue?

- is there a way, alternate to lamp selection, to postprocess a high-T lighting, maybe selecting a given blue value and shifting it to warmer yellows?

 

TIA!

Hervé

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[Echo63]

Photographic shops may have some, but Theatrical shops certainly will.

the solution you are chasing is a CTO or CTS gel.

it will come in a roll, or sheet, and is just precisely coloured plastic film, it should convert your 5600ish kelvin LED source, into 3300ish kelvin (tungsten) coloured light.

it will be a bit dimmer though, as it is filtering out a lot of the bluer wavelengths.

 

the other option, is to shoot raw, process two versions, one with a daylight white balance (for the LED) and a tungsten WB (for the ambient) and layer them together in photoshop - using layer masks to paint in the appropriate area

[Herve5]

(...) the other option, is to shoot raw, process two versions, one with a daylight white balance (for the LED) and a tungsten WB (for the ambient) and layer them together in photoshop - using layer masks to paint in the appropriate area

Ah, yes, expressed like this it sounds much simpler than what I feared ;-)

I do shoot raw, I'll do some testing this evening...