A successful foray into the world of sarcasm from Rodders: Flash gels

Aren't gels a bit redundant this days? Other than the obvious benefits of nailing it SOOC (straight out of cam) it's a piece of cake changing the hue/tint/colour of anything in PP, and you get an infinite choice of colours.

Nope. Look at longshanks' stuff. Say he's posing under an orange street light, and is using his flash to light him in an indulgent self portrait. If his flash is firing out 5600k light, he'll be balanced to 5600k ish, but the ambient will still be much warmer than that.

Shanks goes home to process the balls out of it in LR and add his description text. He decides his ambient is too orange so changes the colour temp in LR to cool down the orange and bring it a bit more white. Unfortunately he now finds that the flash light that was lighting him beautifully in 5600k has now given him a dose of the smurfs as that too has been affected by the global change in colour temp.

He's never going to get a front page explore like that, so next time he goes out he takes his cto (colour temp orange) gel which he puts on the front of his flash. Now when he takes his photo he is lit in orange, as is the ambient - this is awesome, because now when he gets home and tweaks it in lr and adds his caption, the change of colour temp to turn the orange ambient white is now having the desired effect of turning him white too!

This is great. He uploads his photo to flickr, gets 1,000,000 views, 3,000 sparkly awards and fp of flickr explore.

All because of flash gels