ABSTRACT
Color is both a powerful artistic and storytelling tool and a complex technical subject. Derived from the color wheel, it is easy to conceptualize hue as a circle and saturation as its distance from neutral white in the center. Most cameras will have preset color balances but it is usually more accurate to do an active white balance on the set. Sometimes color science strays over that boundary into what are called imaginary colors or non-realizable color, but these are for purely mathematical and engineering reasons. The term gel refers to color material that is placed over lights, windows, or other sources in the scene. Light balancing gels also deal with warm versus cool color but in smaller ranges and more subtle corrections. The problem with fluorescents is that they are not a continuous spectrum source and in most cases their output is very heavy in the green part of the spectrum.
