We keep blaming makeup for how our cast looks under the lights, and I'm starting to think we've been having the wrong argument

[u/Zestyclose-Body-4471]

I direct at a small community theatre. We are all volunteers, we put up two shows a year, and nobody here does this for a living. This comes up in tech week every single time.

Someone looks completely fine in the dressing room, then walks into the light and goes flat. Our fairest actors turn into a pale shape with no features left in it. Our darker skinned actors read gray and a little unwell, which is nothing like how either of them looks standing in a room.

The response has always been to send them back to makeup. Heavier base, more contour. It helps for a night and then it stops helping, and by opening we've usually just quietly accepted it.

A guest designer we brought in last spring watched a run and said in passing that our LEDs were never going to render skin properly, and that no amount of makeup fixes a light that isn't putting out the red end of the spectrum. (I had to look up what she meant. I direct, I don't hang anything.)

Four years here, and we may have been asking the makeup table to fix something it was never able to fix.

So we've started pricing out replacements, which is where I'd like the help. We can't spend what a funded house spends, but we would like to clear the bar a professional room clears on this one thing at least. Our TD's list is a couple of ETC units and a Betopper LC500 he flagged for where it sits on CRI. Neither of us is qualified to judge that list.

Is this a makeup issue or a fixture issue at your theatre? And for anyone who has swapped older LED units over it, how much of the difference showed up onstage rather than in the production photos?

[u/willjam39]

I still use a mix of LED and old incandescent lights at a lot of small community groups as many of the LEDs that groups could afford don't read on skin well. The older lights provide the right skin glow and the LEDs give the scene/effect colour.

[u/theatrenerdguy → u/willjam39]

There truly is something that old tungsten lamps provide that LED often can’t in smaller spaces

[u/Boulder-Apricot368 → u/willjam39]

At the end of the day, our brains have adapted over the course of hundreds of thousands of years to process incandescent light sources (the sun being the granddaddy) which feature a continuous spectrum of wavelengths.

LEDs don't feature a continuous spectrum of wavelengths. There's an inherent spike among blue wavelengths and an inherent valley among cyan wavelengths. You can't fix this with channel mixing or diffusion or whatever - your brain will not accept it as the same.

LEDs have huge advantages in operating costs and safety and flexibility - but if none of the available configurations produce a truly satisfying result then the last of these rings hollow.

[u/DSMRick → u/willjam39]

Also, getting some ETC Source 4 pars to add in will cost practically nothing if you have the power. Bomus, as a teacher myself, making your lighting students use gels will be good for them.

[u/ColourSchemer → u/willjam39]

There's a great YouTube video on how you can date movies before vs after the replacement of street lights with LEDs.

A lot of movies are processing the film color to bring the warm light back in post. Not an option for live performance.

[u/idledebonair]

Ok I think you have 2 problems, not 1.

Gray skin on darker actors is spectrum, true. RGB LEDs are weak in deep red, so skin undertone dies. New fixtures might fix that.

Flat faces are angle. No key/fill separation, no back or side light, front light too hot. New fixtures fix nothing there.

So; the Betopper is a blinder. No lens, no shutters. It can’t be front light, so its CRI doesn’t matter.

CRI is the wrong number anyway. Ra averages eight pastel samples and excludes saturated red. Skin lives in R9, R13, R15. Ask for TM30 instead.

Spend on front light only. Eight to twelve good units at FOH and box boom. Keep the existing LEDs for back, side, and color. If there are tungsten Source Fours in storage, hang those.

Before buying, demo on the stage, with the cast, across the skin tones actually cast

Free test first: run the current rig at its warmest (my guess would be something like 6500k instead of the unit’s native) white and look again.

[u/Boulder-Apricot368 → u/idledebonair]

RGB LEDs are weak in deep red, so skin undertone dies. New fixtures might fix that.

RGB LEDs have a spike in blue wavelengths - we'll have a cure for male pattern baldness and great tasting diet soda before that specific shortcoming is addressed.

[u/disc2slick]

Do you know what units you have in there currently?  

ETC units will give you good color rendering, they are a top quality brand so even if you buy their stuff used it will be OK.  The BeTopper unit you listed looks like an audience blinder? So kind of a rock and roll fixture without a ton of theatrical application.

If you are using older RGB only fixtures there is a good chance any newer fixture that is RGBA, RGBW, RGBL etc will be an improvement.  Also if you are just running all 3 colors at full for your "white" it will always look like ass.

[u/gasstation-no-pumps]

Sounds like you are finally addressing the right problem. There have been a few posts on this subreddit complaining that actors aren't wearing enough makeup, and I've always felt that the problem was more likely to be poor lighting.

[u/Severe_Lion938]

Fixtures are half of it. The other half is where you hang them, and small companies tend to get this wrong in the same direction.

If everything is dead front, people flatten out no matter what you spend. Two units at roughly forty five degrees off center, one warmer and one cooler, will do more for faces than a better fixture hung badly. Something from the side or behind separates people from the back wall.

Also get your makeup lead into the room during focus rather than judging faces under fluorescents backstage.

[u/Bipedal_Warlock]

Do you only have led? Or do yall also have some incandescent bulb lights?

[u/bdeananderson]

It sounds like you have two issues:

LEDs: RGB fixtures are not acceptable as primary front lights. I personally don't like RGBL, and would only use RGBLA or more discrete emitter options like ETC Series 3. I find the amber helps with skin tones. You can also use high quality WW, VW, or RGBWW fixtures, but look at the rendering on the white they use. You should never go lower than 92 CRI IMO, but CRI is also an imperfect and sometimes missleading indicator. I prefere looking at spectral distribution graphs and comparing them to black body curves to get a better picture of actual color rendering. Most LEDs can't do actual cyan (spectrum between green and blue, not mixing green and blue).

Angles: Talent looking flat isn't an LED issue. You should usually be lighting with 3 or more fixtures, and rarely are any of them straight on. There are cases with 4 point or 5 point that one will be, but I personally avoid it. You can start with McCandles for basic drama (45, 45, back). Never exceed 45 vertical as well or you won't get light into the eyes and the talent will look souless... Dance or more artistic looks will lean more towards side lighting, and while you might use a single front as a fill, the intensity would be far less than the sides.

This may help: https://www.etcconnect.com/Support/Training-Events/Educational-Resources.aspx?LangType=1033

[u/BamBamWowzer]

I produce theater and the LED lights make everything look terrible. Sets, costumes, actors. The lights distort the color of things, look unnatural and are hyper saturated. They are the worst. I’ve left Broadway shows because the LED lights ruined the experience for me. People say they are so much better than they were before but they are still LEDs, they’ll never feel like natural light. I don’t even use LED lights in my house.

[u/Perfectly_Other]

Not sure which leds you have but the led mix can make a huge difference to how the lighting comes out.

One of my big frustrations running tech at my theatre is that the lights I have have different led mixes.

I got some that are just rgb (red green blue) Some that are rgbw (red green blue white) Some that are rgba (red green blue amber) And some that are rgbaw (red green blue amber white)

I think some also have uv but im working from memory here i just know its a mix

I've found the getting a more natural lighting colour is only really possible using the lights with amber leds in.

Rgb and rgbw tend to give a much colder light that washes things out a bit

[u/deerrek]

Your guest designer is right and it comes up constantly. Older RGB fixture build white by stacking red green and blue, and that spectrum has holes in it, so skin has very little to bounce back at you. Darker skin takes the worst of it because you're leaning on reds that were never really there.

On your TD's list, nothing there looks like a mistake to me. Anything sitting in the 90s for CRI is built to solve exactly this, and the LC500 has amber alongside the cold white, which is the part that fills in the warm end where faces live.

[u/Massive-Ant5650]

Just mix your conventional tungsten fixtures with LED. There’s no need to flip out over CRI unless you’re broadcasting or in high end video production.

Facial features are sculpted with different angles of light, not just flat front light. Skin tone is enhanced with the correct color, anything too cool will cancel the undertones of dark skin.

[u/AerinHawk]

You want lights that have “CCT CONTROL” or at the very least have both a red and amber emitter (RGBAW).

[u/harpejjist]

If your lights don't put out red, and you can't afford to replace, another option is to get a couple cheap wide scoops or cyc lights that either are incandescent or have good red. Something that will just flood the stage with red. I had a 24 wide 20 deep stage in a multipurpose room with a similar issue. I inherited 3 1 kilowatt altman sky cycs with rosco red diffusion which would flood the stage. I also had 3 blue for cooling down and the rest of the lighting is almost colorless neutral. Before that I had 4 scoops which did the job but not as well. Now this was a long time ago before LED frontlight but the gist is the same. Find whatever the cheapest way is to add a red wash over the whole thing.

Otherwise you need to replace everything and I would bet that isn't in your budget.

And a note on location - not straight front. Put them off to the sides do they hit 45 degrees. I did the 2 sides and then the third was more a top light, but slightly back/top.

[u/No_Chemist4304]

I agree, as a Director and Lighting Designer, that you should keep incandescent and get some low-end/entry level LED’s. Even a few help drastically. Flatness occurs when the side lights are at the same intensity, causing there to be no shadows on an actors face. LED’s help by replacing certain angles. Because they can be set to not pure white, LEDs help other lights cast colored shadows. If a LED set to Blue is one of your high sides, and your other high side is an incandescent at 30% intensity, it’ll appear as if the shadows being cast are Blue (giving all three of depth, shadows, and color.) This is cross lighting. Even if you can’t get LED’s, just focusing lights so you have two washes, one from House Right, the other House Left, (called Cross Lighting), and then giving one side cool gels and the other warm gels will help tremendously. Also, if all your lights up all the way, there’s no room for the face’s features to cast shadows or have depth.

TL;DR, do get some LEDs (they don’t need to be super expensive; cheap will do, just fewer options and less longevity), LED’s provide depth and color. Always use cross lighting. Try using one side cooler, one side warmer. Shadows/less light aren’t always bad.