prism lites violet with 20 developer ratio

Heres a quick list of the complimentary colours and how they relate to their primaries.

If I have a background light then I have it lighting the background and nothing else, when I have a hair light, I have it lighting the hair and nothing else and so on.

This might seem fairly obvious but when youre using white-light and large modifiers like softboxes, the lighting is going everywhere whether you like it or not.

We simply cant get away with being that sloppy with coloured gels.

They step quite aggressively like you see here on this models arm.

The colour appears to go from blue to grey to orange and this can be sometimes be referred to as colour banding.

Ill go into what colour banding is and what that looks like in more detail later on but first off lets take a look at what Im referring to when I say mixing light versus mixing paint.

Light hits the paint on a canvas and is reflected back into our eyes and we see the colour that way.

This is the regular colour wheel were all used to seeing and using.

No light is reflected off any surface like a canvas and the colour is mixed as we see it directly on the screen.

Basically that means that when you shine multiple coloured lights on top of one another, youre actually just getting closer and closer to a white light with no colour at all.

But dont worry youre not alone if think this is weird because weve all spent our entire early school years learning that mixing colours and paint is very different to this.

Weve been told that mixing colours like blue and yellow will result in green and that if we mix red and yellow well get orange and so on.

You can literally forget all of that entirely when it comes to photography and mixing coloured lighting.

Like we mentioned before, white light is actually a complete rainbow (spectrum) of colour so when it hits our red gel, the gel isnt actually turning the light red but instead its filtering out all the other colours of the spectrum leaving only red behind.

If youre not sure what defines a primary colour then its the core set of three colours that all other colours are derived from.

In the painters wheel its Red, Yellow Blue and in the lighting colour wheel its Red, Green Blue (RGB).

As we start to mix these colours we can now see why these colour wheels are laid out the way they are.

Take a look at the two sets of colour wheels below to see what I mean.

My aim is to create an article specifically targeted at photographers and what we NEED to know but if youre interested in the deeper-dive physics of this topic then I recommend this linked article for some light bedtime reading (see what I did there) on Light Absorption, Reflection and Transmission.

Enjoy:).

In art we have something called colour theory, this is the principle that certain colour combinations are more favourable and resonate well with us as people over other colour combinations.

One of the most popular colour theories is the one we refer to as complimentary colours and this is one well be exploring a little deeper with coloured light here.

These three colour combinations are certainly the most popular; red green, purple yellow and orange blue but is there a reason for that.

If youre a bit rusty on your primaries and secondaries then take a look at my handy image below to refresh your memory.

Prism Lites Violet With 20 Developer Ratio