Kelite, thanks for weighing in with an expert opinion! I'm sorry I didn't include
Apollo gel in my giant uber-swatchbook! It will be in there next time.
I'd never thought about the fact that each color designer may have certain tendencies... I wish there was a way to find out who designs which color. This would be interesting both academically and artistically as colors from within a 'family' would conceivably
play well together under some conditions.... but i guess this is what they train us as lighting designers to pieces together... we can't expect you
gel manufacturers to do ALL the hard work for us!
tcahall, age does change gels, but I'm pretty certain the OP was referring to the way a color shifts while it dims. You're right, this
shift comes from the lamp's
color temperature shift, but different gels which may appear similar at full
intensity may look very different at 30 percent, because some blue gels notch out the warm parts of the spectrum better than others... so when the lamp throws more red at them they will pass more or less based on their transmission at the wavelengths that are less prevalent when the lamp is running at full
intensity. This absolutely SHOULD, in my opinion, be a consideration when selecting
gel for any light that will run at lower than about 70% during the show.
I've also found that the manufacturer's spectrum graph and transmission percentage aren't a substitute for the designer's eye actually observing light through a
gel at different intensities. I won't accuse any of the manufacturers of being anything less than scientific in this process, but I know that what I perceive when I pass light through a
gel doesn't always match what I would expect from looking at the graphs... particularly when I'm comparing similar colors from different manufacturers that have very similar graphs, but very different performances in terms of perceived color at different intensities or even very different perceived intensities when they technically have the same 'transmission' number. There's no substitute for looking at light through the
gel. After a while you do get a sense for it, and you certainly know what your 'favorite' colors do without seeing it again, but the value of looking at light through
gel (particularly dimmable light) when picking color cannot be overstated, in my
book. For me an old 3.5"
Leko and a wall
dimmer mounted together is an invaluable tool for color selection, but any lamp that kinda aproximates the color
shift qualities of the lamps you use in the
theatre will work... Could be a great place for an MR-16 lamp in an improvised holder... and you could even
shutter it so it would only shoot light through a slot that matched the size of your
swatchbook...
Art