What happens putting a party gel in front of a lens? what's the difference between doing it and putting a glass filter?

[davide sorasio]

Hello everybody. It might sound like a silly question but I was wondering what would happen if a party gel could anyhow be put in front of the lens (without doing a custom with balance with the filter in front of the lens). What would be the difference between doing this and using a glass filter? And what would happen after doing a custom white balance with the party gel in front of the lens?

Thanks everybody,

Davide

[David Mullen ASC]

Lighting gel is not optically clear so it will blur the image.

 

If you use it to white balance through and then pull it off of the lens afterwards to shoot, then your camera would have shifted the image as best as it could in the opposite direction, but I think a camera would have a hard time correcting the RGB levels to cancel a heavy party color gel in front of the lens. But the paler colored gels would work for white balance tricks.

[davide sorasio]

Thanks so much David for sharing with me (and this is not the first time) your knowledge!

[Alessandro Machi]

Lighting gel is not optically clear so it will blur the image.

 

If you use it to white balance through and then pull it off of the lens afterwards to shoot, then your camera would have shifted the image as best as it could in the opposite direction, but I think a camera would have a hard time correcting the RGB levels to cancel a heavy party color gel in front of the lens. But the paler colored gels would work for white balance tricks.

what about zooming in so the gel goes out of focus, does that minimize the overall affect in the area of sharpness and color correction?

[David Mullen ASC]

Zooming in and using a longer focal length isn't really going to make a lighting gel any sharper to shoot through, though the imperfections in the gel will be less in-focus. Imagine a worse case scenario like shooting through an old rippled window pane, the image you see through that window doesn't get sharper if the lens is longer and the window is more out-of-focus.

 

The color from shooting through gel isn't affected by focus and focal length.