One of the most difficult aspects of purchasing a lighting gel sheet is determining which color will be optimal for your use. For instance, when you are looking at green lighting gel sheets, you could have 20 or more options or variations of green.
How is it that you pick just the right color of lighting gel sheet?
One of the most useful tools that we have found, for those of you that are technically inclined (such as lighting designers and electricians), is to use the Lee Filters Colour Temp Calculator. The Lee Filters Colour Temp Calculator will take your input values and your output values and then give you a couple of lighting gel colors that will work well for your purposes.
For instance, if you original source is 5,700 Kelvin and your converted source is 3,350 Kelvin, then the Lee Filters Colour Temp Calculator would suggest that you use Lee 442 Half CT Straw or Lee 443 Quarter CT Straw. The Lee Filters Colour Temp Calculator is also helpful because you can select your sources as either "all sources, tungsten sources, daylight sources, LED sources, or discharge, arc source." Not everyone knows what their original source and converted source is; however, there's another great tool that you can use to help you determine which gel sheet color is best for your application - it's swatch books!
Another resource that has proven invaluable for many people trying to decide which lighting gel color to utilize, is to purchase a Lee Filters Swatch Book. Lee Filters offers Swatch Books in their Designer Series (which is in color order), Numeric Series (which is in number order), and LED series. The swatches contained in the book are approximately 2 inches by 1 inches in size. In the Lee Filters Designer Swatch Book (and Numeric Swatch Book) you will get a sample of about 400 different gel colors. (Please note that the Designer Swatch Book and Numeric Swatch Book contain exactly the same colors. The Numeric book is in order of Lee numeric codes while the Designer book is in order of color shades). Even though the swatches are small in size, they can still be held in front of your light source to get an idea about the color that would be projected from the source.
Please reach out to us if you should have any questions about selecting the right color gels for your application.