7 Excellent Methods to Balance the Light from a Flash with Tungsten Light

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1. As with balancing your flash and fluorescent lights, you achieve balance with flash and tungsten light by attaching the appropriate gel to the flash head. For tungsten, or incandescent, light that is a “CTO” gel, which looks orange in color.

Remember, the temperature of the light of your flash without any gel is the same as daylight, which is approximately 5,000 to 6,500 on the Kelvin scale, depending on the time of day. The CTO gel makes the light from your flash the same as a typical light bulb in a lamp.

2. The other part of this balancing equation is to set the white balance on your camera to tungsten, which is often represented by a light bulb icon.

3. Of course, balancing the light from your flash and a room illuminated by tungsten light is not quite that simple, which is why this PhotographyTalk.com article will be helpful.

The temperature of tungsten light can also be quite variable, but for a different reason. Lamps or fixtures with incandescent bulbs can be, and are often, on dimmers. As you dim tungsten light, its temperature becomes redder and redder.

4. Before you shoot in a room with all incandescent lights, make sure they are set at their brightest illumination. Only then will the ambient light be at an accurate tungsten temperature, which means the simple solution of a CTO gel should do the trick. It likely won’t be a perfect balance, but any magenta cast to your images will only occur at the fringes of an image, not the center, where your subject receives most of the light from the flash.

For a perfect balance of the flash’s light and the room’s tungsten ambient light, you would not only have to use custom white balance on your camera, but also match the gels in a gel pack with the custom color.

5. When you find yourself shooting quite often in a room with a temperature level of tungsten light that you can’t balance perfectly with your flash, you could create a custom selection of gels for that particular room. Then, it would make sense to choose custom white balance on your camera. This is a limited method, however, because most photographers, including you, likely shoot flash in many rooms with tungsten light of various temperatures.

6. Another method is to regulate the background color effect by controlling the amount of ambient light you include in an image. Shutter speed is your controller, which you want to increase a bit to lessen the color intensity.

7. An excellent gel kit is Rogue Gels from ExpoImaging. They are available as a Universal Kit or Grid Kit. True to its name, the Universal Kit is compatible with almost any flash and many flash accessories. The Grid Kit is meant for use with the Rogue Grid. The Rogue Gel Kits contain 20 filters (1 white diffusing, 5 color correction and 14 artistic color filters). ExpoImaging has made the gels in either kit very versatile, since you can use them together in even more creative combinations.

B&H Photo Video sells the Rogue Gels Universal Kit for $29.95 and the Rogue Gels Grid Kit for $27.95.

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