Gels are a useful way of color correcting the light produced by your studio strobe to match ambient light in a scene, or to shift the color in a scene to create dramatic looks. Gels are also essential in the studio for producing creative effects such as lighting backgrounds and throwing color onto your subject.

Profoto has a really nice system for attaching gels to the front of their OCF studio strobes with stackable grids and gels, but it can get quite expensive if you need a big library of gels in your kit. The dedicated OCF II Gels currently retail for $69 each, which can add up fast.

That’s where the OCF II Gel Ring comes in handy. It’s a gel holder with a magnetic ring which allows you to sandwich one or more cellophane gels behind the magnetic retaining ring, and mount the gel in front of the flash head. It also comes in very attractive packaging, which we’re going to repurpose in this project (more on that later).

Here’s what you’ll need if you want to build this kit for yourself:

• (2) Profoto Off Camera Flash (OCF) Gell Rings

• Case Logic CDW-32 Classic CD Wallet

• Rosco CalColor Gel Set (33 12X12” sheets)

• Fiskars Circle Cutter with 2 Replacement Blades

• Adhesive velcro or double-sided tape

• Packaging inserts from the OFC II Gel Rings

To begin, remove the foam inserts from the Profoto OCF II Gel Ring boxes and attach them to the inside covers (front and back) of the Case Logic case using adhesive velcro or double-sided tape, as shown here:

Next, use the Fiskars circle cutter to cut 90mm circles from the Rosco gel sheets. I recommend cutting a 100mm strip off the full 12X12” sheets, and then cutting three 90mm circular discs out of each strip, as shown below. This will preserve the rest of the 12X12” gel sheet for other uses, if needed.

Now label the sleeves in the CD case for the various types of gels you’ll be storing — something like this:

Finally, insert a 4X4” picture of a color wheel which includes the primary, secondary, and tertiary colors on the last page.
This will help you know how to combine gels of various colors and densities to create just about any color under the rainbow.

The beauty of the Rosco CalColor system is that it includes gels of various densities (typically 15, 30, 60 or 90) which can be used to fine tune the amount of saturation, and to proportionally blend multiple colors together easily. A list of all the included gel colors and densities can be found here. So for example, if you need to make a chartreuse gel, you could combine a Yellow and a low density Green gel in the OCF II Gel Ring. One tip that isn’t often mentioned — you can create various shades of brown by using either blue and orange gels together, or red and green gels together.

In addition to the Rosco CalColor gels, I carry a supply of color correcting gels — including CTO (Full, ½ and ¼) and CTB (Full, ½ and ¼) so I can match my strobe color temperature to tungsten lighting, or shift the color cast and white balance settings in outdoors scenes toward blue for dramatic twilight looks.

For about the cost of three dedicated Profoto OCF II Gels, you can create a complete gel kit with two OCF II gel rings, and plenty of custom cut gels suitable for just about any lighting situation you might encounter.