Gels

Stop Shooting in Neutral: How Creative Gels Can Rebuild Your Studio Lighting From the Ground Up
Studio Lighting

Stop Shooting in Neutral: How Creative Gels Can Rebuild Your Studio Lighting From the Ground Up

I keep a lighting journal. Every setup from every shoot gets sketched into it, date and all, including the ones I want to forget. There’s an entry from a beauty shoot in 2019 where I tried to use a cyan gel on my background light without accounting for how it would interact with the warm skintones I was building from the key. The images looked like a bad Instagram filter from 2012.

Beyond Warm and Cool: How Creative Gels Can Completely Rewire Your Studio Lighting
Studio Lighting

Beyond Warm and Cool: How Creative Gels Can Completely Rewire Your Studio Lighting

I keep a lighting journal. Every shoot gets a sketch: modifier positions, power ratios, distances, and yes, gel colors. I started doing it after a bad experience early in my career where I mixed a 1/2 CTO on my key with an ungelled background light and wondered for three days why my subject’s skin looked like uncooked salmon in every frame. The culprit was obvious in retrospect. At the time, I had no system.

Beyond Daylight: How I Use Creative Gels to Build Color Into a Shot From the Start
Studio Lighting

Beyond Daylight: How I Use Creative Gels to Build Color Into a Shot From the Start

I ruined my first major editorial shoot with color temperature. Not gels, not bad ratios, just the fact that I had two light sources on a model’s face that were about 800 Kelvin apart and I had no idea. One was a tungsten practical in the background, one was a strobe key. The images came back with this muddy, indeterminate skin tone that no amount of color grading could salvage. The art director never said anything, but I didn’t get another call from that publication for two years.

How to Make Sunlight Look Like Moonlight: A Step-by-Step Lighting Breakdown
Video Tutorials

How to Make Sunlight Look Like Moonlight: A Step-by-Step Lighting Breakdown

There’s a specific kind of panic that hits when you’re on a set and the light outside is doing something beautiful but completely wrong for your shot. I’ve been there more than once, staring at warm afternoon window light pouring across a scene that was supposed to feel cold and cinematic. For years, I treated that as a problem to fix in post. Then I started understanding white balance not as a correction tool, but as a creative weapon.

Beyond CTB and CTO: How I Actually Use Creative Gels to Build a Shot
Studio Lighting

Beyond CTB and CTO: How I Actually Use Creative Gels to Build a Shot

The Gel Drawer Most Photographers Never Open Every lighting kit I’ve seen in a rental house has the same thing: a neat stack of CTO and CTB corrections at the front of the gel drawer, and then a mess of colors shoved behind them that nobody touches. Full CTO for tungsten matching. Half CTB for a cooler key. That’s where most photographers stop, and I understand why. Correction gels have a clear purpose.

Creative Gels for Studio Photography: The Ingredient That Changes Everything
Lighting

Creative Gels for Studio Photography: The Ingredient That Changes Everything

I’ve spent twenty years mixing light the way a chef mixes ingredients, and I can tell you this: most photographers treat gels like an afterthought. They’re not. Gels are the difference between competent work and compelling work. Think of gels as your most controllable variable. You can’t change the sun, but you can shape every photon in your studio. That precision is why I use gels on nearly every shoot.

Color Gels: Adding Creative Color to Your Portraits
Creative

Color Gels: Adding Creative Color to Your Portraits

Color gels transform white flash into colored light, opening a world of creative possibilities that neutral lighting can’t touch. From subtle color accents to full neon-drenched portraits, gels give you control over the color of light itself — not just what you can adjust in post-processing. Gels Basics Gels are thin sheets of colored transparent material (traditionally theatrical lighting gel) placed in front of a light source. They filter out certain wavelengths, transmitting only the desired color.

5 Beauty Lighting Setups From Soft to Bold: A Complete Behind-the-Scenes Breakdown
Studio Lighting

5 Beauty Lighting Setups From Soft to Bold: A Complete Behind-the-Scenes Breakdown

I recently watched this Westcott tutorial that walks through five completely different beauty lighting setups — all in one session, same model, progressing from soft natural looks to bold creative effects. It’s one of the best demonstrations I’ve seen of how much you can change a portrait just by rearranging light. Here’s my breakdown of each setup with the key takeaways. The Studio Setup The studio is loaded with Westcott gear — multiple softboxes of different sizes, a large parabolic umbrella, and several FJ-series strobes.