ABSTRACT
Color is both a powerful artistic and storytelling tool and a complex technical subject. As with most artistic tools, the better the cinematographers understand the technical side, the better equipped they will be to use it to serve our creative purposes. A desaturated color in everyday terms might be called a pastel. These terms are the basis for two color models: hue/saturation/value and hue/saturation/lightness. These systems are widely used in computer graphics and sometimes show up in applications used in dealing with video streams or individual frames. The term gel refers to color material that is placed over lights, windows, or other sources in the scene. Filter is the term for anything placed in front of the lens to (among other things) control color. There are several basic reasons to change the color of lighting in a scene, which can be done by adding gels to the sources or by using daylight or tungsten units.
