Colors
Similar colors may vary between different companies' formulations - for example, many have a color named "bastard amber", but the transmitted color spectrum may be different. For this reason, gel colors are not referred to by name. Using nature’s color spectrum as a guide, Apollo Design Technology uses a four digit number to designate and locate specific color transmissions: Visible Spectrum. Some manufacturers use a code consisting of a letter and number combination. For example, G841 is a dark blue made by Great American Market (GAM), and R02 is a light amber made by Rosco and L216 is a diffusion filter made by Lee Filters.
Manufacturers produce swatch books, which contain a small piece of each color available, adjacent to its color code, to simplify ordering. Swatch books enable designers and technicians to have a true representation of the manufacturers' range of color.
Most designers choose a limited color palette for generic applications because it is financially and logistically difficult to have access to all colors for a single show.
There are also gels for color correction, such as CTB and CTO, "Color Temperature Blue", and "Color Temperature Orange" respectively. Color correction gels alter or "correct" the color temperature of a light to more closely match the color temperature of a film negative or the white balance of a digital imager. Specifically CTB, which is blue in appearance, will correct tungsten lights that typically have a color temperature in the range of 3,200 kelvins to 5,700 kelvins to more closely match the color temperature of "Daylight" negative, which is usually around 5,400 kelvins (nominal daylight). CTO, which is orange in appearance, will correct a "Daylight" balanced light source (such as many common HMI bulbs) to match the color temperature of Tungsten negative, which is typically 3,200 kelvins. There are "half" and "quarter" variations of the common color correction gels. It is common to use color correction gels for artistic purposes and not just for negative-to-lightsource correction.
Most ranges of gels also include non-colored media, such as a variety of diffusion and directional "silk" materials to produce special lighting effects. "Opal" for example is an opalescent or translucent diffusion filter.
It is common for a gel manufacturer to publish the transmission coefficient or even the spectral transmittance curve in the swatch book and catalogs. A low transmittance gel will produce relatively little light on stage, but will cast a much more vivid color than a high transmission gel, because the colorfulness of a light source is directly related to narrowness of its spectral linewidth. Conversely, the flatter its curve becomes, the closer the gel is to a neutral density filter.
Read more about this topic: Color Gel
Famous quotes containing the word colors:
“In Haydn’s oratorios, the notes present to the imagination not only motions, as, of the snake, the stag, and the elephant, but colors also; as the green grass.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“He hath ribbons of all the colors i’the rainbow.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“Adultery is the vice of equivocation.
It is not marriage but a mockery of it, a merging that mixes love and dread together like jackstraws. There is no understanding of contentment in adultery.... You belong to each other in what together you’ve made of a third identity that almost immediately cancels your own. There is a law in art that proves it. Two colors are proven complimentary only when forming that most desolate of all colors—neutral gray.”
—Alexander Theroux (b. 1940)