I've been wanting to try an RGB gelled shoot for a while. RGB refers to the coloured gels I used. In light red green and blue mixed together (with the correct power levels) create neutral light. The plan was to have all 3 lights mix in a small area on the model's face and allow the gels to show prominently around the rest of the scene. I used a white seamless paper for the background.

For this setup I needed 3 lights, in this case, I used Pixapro Kino 600 strobes, 3 standard metal reflector dishes and I used 2 grids too. I used the grids on both the green and blue lights to restrict how much they spread, whilst leaving the red light to spread across the whole scene. I wanted the white seamless paper to absorb some of the red gel light and turn it pink.

I initially had a super brief attempt in a small white studio earlier in the year in the 10-minute gap I was waiting for a model to arrive. Needless to say, without foreplanning and all being a spur of the moment whole ass setup, this turned out dreadful.

This time, however, I made a plan to shoot a full setup. The studio is bigger than the small white one I used previously which helps to stop light being thrown around everywhere and mixing into a muddy mess.

Juggling power outputs took about 10 minutes of adjusting. It's one of those situations where the technical stuff is super important. Luckily, my model was really relaxed and understood that it wasn't the quickest setup to experiment with. 

I started with each of the Kino 600 heads at 1/32 power. Gels of different colours absorb light in different amounts. For example, my dark blue and red gels need an extra stop of light at least than my greens and yellows. After some trial and error, I set my red and blue to 1/16th power and my green to 1/32nd power. My green was also about a foot closer to the model than the other 2 strobes.

Remember, my blue and green strobes had grids on to restrict how much spread they had on the scene. This means the area where all 3 colours converge is a very small area on the face, creating a beautiful pool of neutral light, really focusing our attention on Elle's face.  Those astute of you may see a few other colours in the shadows too! When red, green and blue mix, yellow, magenta and cyan are produced too.

More specifically green and red create yellow. Blue and green create cyan. And red and blue create magenta. Mixing red, green and blue together to create neutral light is what we call additive light.

I shot the whole set on my Fujifilm XH2 and my Viltrox 75mm 1.2 Pro lens. The Viltrox is an incredible lens for portraits with fantastic sharpness. Shots like this really make the most of the Fujifilm high-res sensor and lens combo!

Post-processing was pretty simple and easy for these shots. I did minimal adjustments in CaptureOne, then over to Photoshop for the heavy lifting. I used my usual portrait workflow which involves clean-up, frequency separation, and dodge and burn. Finally, I finetuned the colours to add a tiny bit more colour contrast into the shot, then sharpened. The usual stuff.

It was a really fun and creative setup to figure out and shoot. I think the results speak for themself. Adjusting power outputs to get a correct exposure took a little longer than I had anticipated. I think using a soft modifier would have made all the colours muddy too, so hard modifiers are the way to go. If I shoot a setup light this again I'd play around with light positions and relation to each other. I'd also play with power outputs more for a different dominating colour and see how much more it affects the shots.

Below is one of the final edited shots from the shoot

Below is a behind the scenes shot of the setup. The posing cube was placed only as something for Elle to lean on.  The little device beside her is a heater as it was insanely cold!