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How to Color Match Strobes to Any Lighting Situation

Chris Gampat
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02/03/2014
2 Mins read

Last Updated on 02/03/2014 by Julius Motal

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This is a guest blog post by Ian Christmann. The original post was published here.

I’ve worked out a process I wanted to share for color correcting my strobes that results in a lot less post-process color correction time (like none). This works well whether you’re shooting a wedding in a windowless hotel ballroom and need a little fill light, or when doing portraits under florescent lights.

I bought a sample pack of roscolux gels and removed all the gels that converted Kelvin and Magenta-green correction. I then taped two of the same gels together and trimmed them to fit inside my Canon 600 ex-rt gel holder.

Using my Sekonic c-500 meter, I took a reading of the gels’ temperature by strobing the gel through the flash at the color meter. This gave me the gel’s temperature reading, which I then recorded directly on the gel with a sharpie.

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When on location for a shoot, I read the color temperature of the ambient light in an indoor location. This will give me two readings: a temperature reading in kelvin and a tint reading in magenta.

Next, I take the gel filter pack I created and stack the gels in my 600 EX-RT gel clip to numerically match both readings from the C-500.

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The last step is to color balance the camera to match the color of the gels. This is done by shooting a grey card with a flash and white balancing the camera off the grey card. Just to be safe, I will also shoot a color checker passport to create a profile in Lightroom to ensure accuracy. See example below.

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This is a guest blog post by Ian Christmann. The original post was published here.

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Chris Gampat is the Editor in Chief, Founder, and Publisher of the Phoblographer. He provides oversight to all of the daily tasks, including editorial, administrative, and advertising work. Chris's editorial work includes not only editing and scheduling articles but also writing them himself. He's the author of various product guides, educational pieces, product reviews, and interviews with photographers. He's fascinated by how photographers create, considering the fact that he's legally blind./ HIGHLIGHTS: Chris used to work in Men's lifestyle and tech. He's a veteran technology writer, editor, and reviewer with more than 15 years experience. He's also a Photographer that has had his share of bylines and viral projects like "Secret Order of the Slice." PAST BYLINES: Gear Patrol, PC Mag, Geek.com, Digital Photo Pro, Resource Magazine, Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Finance, IGN, PDN, and others. EXPERIENCE: Chris Gampat began working in tech and art journalism both in 2008. He started at PCMag, Magnum Photos, and Geek.com. He founded the Phoblographer in 2009 after working at places like PDN and Photography Bay. He left his day job as the Social Media Content Developer at B&H Photo in the early 2010s. Since then, he's evolved as a publisher using AI ethically, coming up with ethical ways to bring in affiliate income, and preaching the word of diversity in the photo industry. His background and work has spread to non-profits like American Photographic Arts where he's done work to get photographers various benefits. His skills are in SEO, app development, content planning, ethics management, photography, Wordpress, and other things. EDUCATION: Chris graduated Magna Cum Laude from Adelphi University with a degree in Communications in Journalism in 2009. Since then, he's learned and adapted to various things in the fields of social media, SEO, app development, e-commerce development, HTML, etc. FAVORITE SUBJECT TO PHOTOGRAPH: Chris enjoys creating conceptual work that makes people stare at his photos. But he doesn't get to do much of this because of the high demand of photography content. / BEST PHOTOGRAPHY TIP: Don't do it in post-production when you can do it in-camera.