Flash Gels

[SpartanGTR]

Got a flash for the holidays, starting to get more into lighting. One of the things I picked up was a set of gels. I understand the use of a CTO gel, but what if I want to go the opposite direction? Let's say I want to use my flash around my house. A lot of the bulbs in my house are daylight balanced 6500K bulbs. The temp of my flash is ~5500K. The CTO gels would take my color temp down, but what if I want to bump my flash from 5500 to 6500?

 

[Alexr25]

The bare unfiltered flash should be close enough but if you want to be pedantic you can use a 1/8 CT-Blue gel to get matching color balance.
This site might interest you as it has a handy color correction calculator.

 

[Buckster]

As noted, the bare un-gelled flash should be pretty close to daylight balanced already. If you want to get really picky, get yourself a Passport Color Checker and deal with it in post processing.

At the very least, get a gray card and put it into the first frame, then use that set your white balance/color temp in the camera, or to color balance in post. I use one of these, and it works great for me:

Photovision 14" Pocket One Shot Digital Target DT14010 B&H

 

[TCampbell]

Also, you should probably check your light bulbs instead of trusting them. The advertised color temperature of the typical store light bulb and the actual color temperature can be quite a bit off.

You may not need to do anything since flash is intended to be natively 'daylight' color balanced.

 

[Scoody]

One technique I use especially on a cloudy day is I set my White Balance to Tungsten Mode and place an amber gel on my speedlight. Get some awesome results' with all the grey clouds looking a brilliant blue while my subject looks completely natural.

 

[Forkie]

The opposite of CTO is CTB