Fluorescent filters?

Does anyone use any lens filters for shooting under standard office type fluorescents? I'm shooting at 3200 and I would like the colors to be a bit richer.

Thanks!


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I usually just use minus green and gel the lights. I'd rather make the light correct on set. But that's just me.

Well these are like existing lights that are in an office. Like standard overhead lights. It would be kind of unreasonable to gel all of them in the whole office.

The problem with fluorescent lighting, even the KINO ones, is that they are discharge lights.

Their colour comes from the mix of gasses in the tubes that makes up the light that they emit.

They don't even or equally emit colour in all parts of the spectrum.

Even filtering or gelling a fluro means you're "balancing" the colour but if the light is weak in the part of the spectrum you want or need, then gelling it won't "add" that colour in....

It's the same with LED's. They also generally have a very low CRI. This means the light emitted is very "peaky" and if the light you're using to light a colour doesn't have that colour in it, then there's no light to reflect to the camera.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_rendering_index

You generally want a light to be better than 95 CRI. Most office fluros struggle to get to 80.

It depends a lot on the scale of what you're doing but these days, it's not unusual to have a mix of colour. So you light up your foreground subject and then let the background go. It might go a bit green i the BG, but you've lit your foreground with higher CRI lights and your subject is what's important. If there's a bit of daylight around, I'll sometimes just turn the fluro's off and let it go moody, again, lighting up my forground.

Other solutions are also epic in scale because most don't have the resources to change or gel all the light's in an office.

jb

It depends a lot on the scale of what you're doing but these days, it's not unusual to have a mix of colour. So you light up your foreground subject and then let the background go. It might go a bit green i the BG, but you've lit your foreground with higher CRI lights and your subject is what's important. If there's a bit of daylight around, I'll sometimes just turn the fluro's off and let it go moody, again, lighting up my forground.

Yes. That's what I do. I've even mixed fluoro and tungsten in regards to the background and subject, respectively. By necessity, mind you, because the house I worked for wouldn't spring for gels. But, I'm a huge fan of just turning off the overheads.

Office flouros are just a big PITA. They all emit different color spectrums depending what the caretaker had lying around when an exchange was needed. Sorry to bring bad news, but they are near impossible to balance correctly.

Did i mention I'm a fan of switching them off and do your own lighting?

Another option, if you have the money and time is to reglobe them all. Or at least reglobe the prominent ones.