lighting under fluorescent lights

A

a.r.

Guest
I have to shoot a project this weekend and the locations where I am shooting at have fluorescent lights. I have a kinoflo light and three 650 watt lamps that I am able to use. My problem is shooting under fluorescent lights will create a green look on my film, can you tell what can I do to solve this problem?
 
If you don't want a green look (sometimes you do), then every light source in the scene has to match each other -- either all matched to the same degree of green (by adding Plus-Green gels to the non-green lights) so that you can then remove the overall green (either with a magenta-ish correction filter on the camera, or by white-balancing, or in post color-correction)... or the green lights corrected to match the other lights (either by swapping the greenish fluorescent tubes to ones without a green cast, or by adding Minus-Green correction gel to the lights).

You didn't say whether you had real daylight coming from windows to deal with, color temperature-wise.

Fluorescent tubes come in a number of color temperatures, some closer to daylight, some closer to tungsten, and they vary in terms of the amount of green in them.

Your 650w lights are tungsten-balanced.

So if you've got daylight windows to deal with, then you have to decide what color temperature to light to, and whether to add or subtract the green on any of the lights. The general rule is to do whatever is easiest by balancing everything to the dominant source in the room. For example, if real daylight is coming in from big windows, then the best approach would be to make all of your other lighting match daylight. So you'd use Kino 55 tubes in the Kinoflo, you'd swap the overhead fluorescents to Kino 55 or the cheaper Chroma 50's, you'd gel the 650w tungsten lights with Full CTB.

If the overhead fluorescents are Cool Whites (which are more or less around 4700K and half-green these days, depending on the make) you could gel them to daylight by adding about 1/4 CTO and 1/2 Minus Green to them, though swapping them out would be better.

Now if the overhead fluorescents are Cool Whites and are the strongest light in the scene, and there is only a tiny daylight window, you may decide to match all of your light to that color. So you may add 1/2 or 1/4 Plus Green to the window, add 1/2 Plus Green and 3/4 CTB to the 650w tungstens, and put Cool White tubes into your Kinoflo. Then every light will be greenish and you can then correct out the green (in camera, in post, etc.)

The variations are endless... but the general idea is that you need all of your lighting to match each other before you can do an overall correction (unless you want the mismatching for artistic reasons.)
 
Or if you're shooting digitally, you can simply white balance the camera to the flourescent lights to remove the green.
 

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