DIY Studio Lights - How to Build Your Own!

**Using Aluminium as a Grounding Material**

The process of creating these LED lights begins with using aluminium as a grounding material, which allows us to use it as the negative conductor for the LED dimmers. The red wire on the other hand can have various sections of it exposed and then these can be sold to the positive tabs on each of the LED strips.

**Sorting Power Inputs**

The power inputs are now sorted by attaching the aluminium to one end, which allows us to use it as a reference point for connecting all the different parts of the circuit. This also enables us to add some small metal pieces that help with the connection between the aluminium and the other components in the circuit.

**Control Side of the Circuit**

The control side of the circuit requires three LED dimmers, which work by rapidly turning on and off at a rate of 10 kilohertz. This rapid rate creates an imperceptible flicker that is perceived as lower brightness, making it suitable for use with cameras without visible artifacts. The dimmers are mounted onto the other semi circle, allowing them to be controlled using knobs.

**Adding Knobs and Power Adapters**

Once the dimmers are installed, some knobs can be added to adjust the brightness of each set of color temperature strips. A 12-volt power adapter is then plugged into any one of the three power sockets. After this, the dimmers should be able to control each of the color sets individually.

**Light Diffusion**

However, these lights are very bright and can cause discomfort due to their strong afterglows, even at brief glance. To solve this issue, a diffusion sheet is used to spread out the light over its entire surface, making it an order of magnitude easier on the eyes without blocking any light. The problem with the diffusion sheet, however, is that it's really flimsy and floppy.

**Making a Sturdy Diffusion Sheet**

To create a sturdy diffusion sheet, medium thickness acetate can be used, which is scored along its length to make it foldable. A piece of paper that matches the length of the arc on the semicircle is then marked with a second fold line, and this process allows for the creation of the perfect size for fitting over the lights.

**Attaching the Diffusion Sheet**

To attach the diffusion sheet in place, two strips of low-density PVC plastic are used. The holes along their lengths match the holes in the aluminium, which also need to be mirrored on the acetate as well. This allows for a neat fold of the acetate around the lights without splitting.

**Securing the Diffusion Sheet**

The diffusion sheet is secured in place using countersink m4 screws, which are inserted into the PVC strips and pull them down flush with the surface. The other side is then covered with the diffusion sheet, which is cut to match the inside area of the acetate.

**Final Assembly**

Before screwing down the other side, some PVC arches can be added to clamp over the acetate and group it down. Any overlapping acetate is then trimmed off, leaving a neat and secure attachment. The finished lights are now rigid, unbendable, and perfect for either home lighting or studio lighting.

**Mounting the Lights**

To mount these lights onto a wall, simply use two nails. If a light stand is required, it's just a case of making a quick frame out of aluminium angles to which they can be screwed. The three power sockets on each light allow them to be daisy chained together from just one power supply.

**Conclusion**

The creation of these LED lights is not only useful but also visually striking. With all the necessary links and information provided in the description, it's possible for you to make some of these lights yourself. Many thanks are given to those who decide to support the creator on their Patreon account.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enmore and more people making YouTube videos at home these days and in doing so they generally need some way to film I like a little home studio and one of the most important things to get right with this studio is lighting as it tells people that your video has good production values and that is worth watching trouble is lighting is often quite expensive especially for newcomers so in this video I'm going to be showing you how to make some very low-cost studio lights that can take a boring old lighting setup like this and turn it into this quite an improvement now one of the features of the lights is that they have three different color temperatures so you can go from warm white all the way up to really cool white which is a good way of adding dynamics to your scene because it gives a real three-dimensional effect if some of it is lit by a warm light and others on lit by a cool white and of course color accuracy you know me it's paramount so these are using really good quality LEDs that produce accurate and lifelike color which is something that budget LED lights don't do so this is a good way of getting really good quality for not much money we're going to be doing them as economy of scale so we're going to make five of them at once so that we can get a good lighting setup for not too much time and not much money at all so without further ado let's get to it by the way if you like my products and want to support what I do here on YouTube please consider supporting the channel through patreon patrons get access to several dare I said perks including free access to all project blueprints and source files visit patreon.com slash DIY perks for more information and many thanks for your support so before we start construction I'll give you a quick overview of the finished lights as you can see each light is shaped like a half cylinder for maximum diffusion which makes them very easy on the eyes as the light is very soft they can be mounted onto walls directly which is helpful if you don't have any light stands or if you want to use the lights for general home lighting they can also be joined together to make a giant softbox which is in itself a great use case as it's significantly thinner than a bought one which makes them perfect for use in small studios so the first task in making them is to cut down a sheet of aluminium into strips to use as the main supporting back panels for the lights we're using aluminium here as it's not only cheap and easy to work with but it's also a good conductor of heat so it will keep the LEDs cooler by dispersing excess heat into the surrounding air now I've borrowed a jigsaw for this job as it slices through the one millimeter thick sheet like butter and I kept it straight by running it along the edge of a piece of wood to clean up the edges afterwards you could use a deburring tool but if you don't have one you could just use a blade like I did now a good size to cut these into is 80 centimetres by 14 centimetres as it keeps the material costs lower and also ensures that the final lights aren't too big and bulky feel free to scale it up or down however to your needs but you will have to disregard any subsequent measurements I give out so once they're all cut we can stack them together and drill four holes along each edge if any of them have jagged edges you can try manually twisting a much larger drill bit over them to clean them up so if that done we now need plenty of rivet nuts these can be fitted onto the end of a nut rivet tool pushed through the holes we just made and then the tool can be used to clamp them to the aluminum this is like my new favorite tool and you can find a link to it in the description so this gives us plenty of mounting nuts which will later be using to attach to some important structural strips more on that later though so before moving on to the next step we also need to drill two holes at the top and bottom of each sheet which will later be used to mount some semicircular support arches we also need to follow these up with a small central hole at the top and bottom for a small screw to be bolted through to act as a power ground anchor point which I'll again be covering in more detail in just a minute so with that it's time to add the light source and it will come as no surprise to those of you who are familiar with the channel to find that it's in the form of you guessed it LED strips as I usually recommend it's important not to skimp out on these as cheap ones often have really bad color rendition there now I really recommend that you go with photography grade strips even if you only want to use the final lights for general home lighting so I've put some amazon and ebay links to the ones I personally recommend in the video's description these are new to the market and better than everything that's have used in the past they're still pretty low cost but are bright and have a color rendering index of 95 which is close to a perfect score of 100 but the best part is that they do this without faking it so the white point is right in the middle rather than shifted towards magenta or red as usual the company that makes them does ship from China so you might want to order them straight away so that you don't have to wait for them to arrive when you want to start working on this project so to achieve the wide range of color temperatures I showed you earlier will need a set of three different color temperature strips the first and primary one is a daylight match strip which is pretty much what you'd consider as pure white to stretch its tone and make it appear warmer or cooler however we also need to add a strip of warm white and a strip of ice blue it's important to note that this ice blue strip isn't actually a spike of blue light as it appears but is instead a white LED heavily shifted to the blue end of the spectrum meaning that there are some other tones mixed in there like green and a tiny bit of yellow this makes it very useful for mixing with the primary daylight match trip to make sky blue which is superb for adding freshness to your lighting setup and this is something that's very hard to achieve otherwise so before sticking on the LEDs any protective film on the aluminium can be peeled away which until this point has kept the surface clean and free from fingerprints which should help the LEDs to stick down more reliably this is fairly straightforward but before doing it you need to make sure that you add a layer of insulating electrical tape to the top and bottom to prevent any short circuits when we wire them up each strip needs to be cut in between the copper pads so that is about 75 centimeters long and the first one can be stuck to the aluminium just off-center once two of these have been added and in my case it was the daylight match strips I added first we can do the same with the ice blue strip and then the warm white strips the idea here is to have to daylight match strips in the middle followed by two ice blue strips and then two warm white strips to ensure that they never peel away it's a good idea to add some dubs of hot glue to their edges every 15 centimeters or so once they've been added to all of the aluminium box we're almost ready to wire them up before we do this however we need to make some semicircular supports which can be made out of a sheet of low-density PVC plastic this stuff is used for sign making and is fairly inexpensive I have access to a CNC router so I just lazily left it to cut them out for me yay but to make these with basic tools it's almost as easy so to do this you can first mark out a semicircle with a seven centimeter radius and carefully cut it out with a coping saw we need to make some vents in it too to our air to circulate so we can drill six holes in it like so and join the topmost two together with the coping saw and finally we can drill three holes to mount the components in see who needs a CNC now each light needs two of these semicircles and the three component holds on the second one needs to be heavily countersunk for the brightness knobs to later fit into a force in a bit would work great for doing this so - why these up we'll first need a set of three power sockets these can simply be screwed into the holes like so and we need to wire them up in parallel so we can measure out a length of red wire and expose sections of it with some wire cutters and solved with ease to the positive tabs on the power sockets which are the slightly shorter of the two tabs the same can be done with the black wire only this time hooking took to the slightly longer negative taps this whole semicircle can then be attached to the aluminium by screwing into it with self-tapping screws through those holes we made earlier now the negative wire needs to be bent into a circle and sold it up to make it stiff so that it can be slid onto that small screw we added earlier and clamped down with a note this grounds the aluminium allowing us to use it as the negative conductor for the LED dimmers in just a moment the red wire on the other hand can have various sections of it exposed and then these can be sold it to the positive tabs on each of the LED strips like so with the power inputs now sorted we now need to work on the control side so that we can adjust the brightness of each set of color temperature strips for which we'll need three LED dimmers these work by rapidly turning on and off but they operate it's such a rapid rate 10 kilohertz in fact that the flickering is imperceptible to the eye and is in sted perceived as lower brightness it's not visible to cameras either so long as the shutter speed is below one one thousandth of a second these can be mounted onto the other semi circle like so and then wide up to the LED strips this is fairly straightforward but as usual with circuits is better to work off a diagram so I've included one in the video's description once this has been done some knobs can be added and then a 12-volt power adapter can be plugged into any one of the three power sockets after which the dimmers should be able to control each of the color sets individually as you can see they're very bright but as a result they are difficult to look at directly and they leave strong after glows in your eyes even if you glance at them only briefly this makes them uncomfortable to use so we need to diffuse them with a diffusion sheet this stuff is inexpensive and spreads the light over its entire surface making it an order of magnitude easier on the eyes you doesn't block any light it just spreads it out the problem with the Sheep though is this it's really flimsy and floppy so we need to find a way to give it some strength to do this we can use some medium thickness acetate as you can see I've already cooked mine down too much to the height of the lights so the next step is to carefully score a very shallow fold from arc along one side being careful not to cut all the way through now we can get a piece of paper that matches the length of the arch on the semicircle and use it to mark where a second fold line can go which can also be very lightly scored finally about two centimeters up from this second mark we can trim it off completely making it the perfect size for fitting over the lights so to attach this in place we're going to use two strips of low-density PVC plastic the same stuff in fact that was used for making the semi circles now I've drilled holes along their lengths matching the holes in the aluminium which also need to be mirrored on the acetate as well with that done for both sides we can now bend the acetate along the marked grooves so long as the marks are on the outside of the bends it should fold neatly along them without splitting now one side can be placed on the back of the aluminium with one of the PVC strips on top and screwed in place I'm using countersink m4 screws here as they will pull into the PVC and become flush with its surface so before screwing down the other side we need to add the diffusion sheet which first needs to be cut down to match the inside area of the acetate in fact you need to make this about three millimeters thinner overall so that it doesn't crease as it's folded around once this is in place the acetate can be folded over and the other strip can be used to clamp it against the aluminium again using countersink screws to hold it in place to finish things off I added some PVC arches which clamp over the acetate wants group down are then trimmed off any overlapping acetate now adding this acetate covering not only protects the LEDs and diffuses the light but it also makes the entire light rigid and unbendable which is excellent considering they weigh only 700 grams once you've finished the others that can be used to great effect for either home lighting or studio lighting to map them onto a wall you can simply use a couple of nails but if you want to mount them on a light stand it's just a case of making a quick frame out of aluminium angles to which they can be screwed this is also why there's three power sockets on each light as it allows them to be daisy chained together from just one power supply so I hope you've enjoyed this video and if you want to make some of these lights yourself which I hope you do because they are really useful you can find all the links to the stuff needed to make them in the description as well as a link to my patreon account and many thanks if you decide to support me on there but other than that I'm Matt you've been watching DIY perks and I hope to see you next time good bye for nowmore and more people making YouTube videos at home these days and in doing so they generally need some way to film I like a little home studio and one of the most important things to get right with this studio is lighting as it tells people that your video has good production values and that is worth watching trouble is lighting is often quite expensive especially for newcomers so in this video I'm going to be showing you how to make some very low-cost studio lights that can take a boring old lighting setup like this and turn it into this quite an improvement now one of the features of the lights is that they have three different color temperatures so you can go from warm white all the way up to really cool white which is a good way of adding dynamics to your scene because it gives a real three-dimensional effect if some of it is lit by a warm light and others on lit by a cool white and of course color accuracy you know me it's paramount so these are using really good quality LEDs that produce accurate and lifelike color which is something that budget LED lights don't do so this is a good way of getting really good quality for not much money we're going to be doing them as economy of scale so we're going to make five of them at once so that we can get a good lighting setup for not too much time and not much money at all so without further ado let's get to it by the way if you like my products and want to support what I do here on YouTube please consider supporting the channel through patreon patrons get access to several dare I said perks including free access to all project blueprints and source files visit patreon.com slash DIY perks for more information and many thanks for your support so before we start construction I'll give you a quick overview of the finished lights as you can see each light is shaped like a half cylinder for maximum diffusion which makes them very easy on the eyes as the light is very soft they can be mounted onto walls directly which is helpful if you don't have any light stands or if you want to use the lights for general home lighting they can also be joined together to make a giant softbox which is in itself a great use case as it's significantly thinner than a bought one which makes them perfect for use in small studios so the first task in making them is to cut down a sheet of aluminium into strips to use as the main supporting back panels for the lights we're using aluminium here as it's not only cheap and easy to work with but it's also a good conductor of heat so it will keep the LEDs cooler by dispersing excess heat into the surrounding air now I've borrowed a jigsaw for this job as it slices through the one millimeter thick sheet like butter and I kept it straight by running it along the edge of a piece of wood to clean up the edges afterwards you could use a deburring tool but if you don't have one you could just use a blade like I did now a good size to cut these into is 80 centimetres by 14 centimetres as it keeps the material costs lower and also ensures that the final lights aren't too big and bulky feel free to scale it up or down however to your needs but you will have to disregard any subsequent measurements I give out so once they're all cut we can stack them together and drill four holes along each edge if any of them have jagged edges you can try manually twisting a much larger drill bit over them to clean them up so if that done we now need plenty of rivet nuts these can be fitted onto the end of a nut rivet tool pushed through the holes we just made and then the tool can be used to clamp them to the aluminum this is like my new favorite tool and you can find a link to it in the description so this gives us plenty of mounting nuts which will later be using to attach to some important structural strips more on that later though so before moving on to the next step we also need to drill two holes at the top and bottom of each sheet which will later be used to mount some semicircular support arches we also need to follow these up with a small central hole at the top and bottom for a small screw to be bolted through to act as a power ground anchor point which I'll again be covering in more detail in just a minute so with that it's time to add the light source and it will come as no surprise to those of you who are familiar with the channel to find that it's in the form of you guessed it LED strips as I usually recommend it's important not to skimp out on these as cheap ones often have really bad color rendition there now I really recommend that you go with photography grade strips even if you only want to use the final lights for general home lighting so I've put some amazon and ebay links to the ones I personally recommend in the video's description these are new to the market and better than everything that's have used in the past they're still pretty low cost but are bright and have a color rendering index of 95 which is close to a perfect score of 100 but the best part is that they do this without faking it so the white point is right in the middle rather than shifted towards magenta or red as usual the company that makes them does ship from China so you might want to order them straight away so that you don't have to wait for them to arrive when you want to start working on this project so to achieve the wide range of color temperatures I showed you earlier will need a set of three different color temperature strips the first and primary one is a daylight match strip which is pretty much what you'd consider as pure white to stretch its tone and make it appear warmer or cooler however we also need to add a strip of warm white and a strip of ice blue it's important to note that this ice blue strip isn't actually a spike of blue light as it appears but is instead a white LED heavily shifted to the blue end of the spectrum meaning that there are some other tones mixed in there like green and a tiny bit of yellow this makes it very useful for mixing with the primary daylight match trip to make sky blue which is superb for adding freshness to your lighting setup and this is something that's very hard to achieve otherwise so before sticking on the LEDs any protective film on the aluminium can be peeled away which until this point has kept the surface clean and free from fingerprints which should help the LEDs to stick down more reliably this is fairly straightforward but before doing it you need to make sure that you add a layer of insulating electrical tape to the top and bottom to prevent any short circuits when we wire them up each strip needs to be cut in between the copper pads so that is about 75 centimeters long and the first one can be stuck to the aluminium just off-center once two of these have been added and in my case it was the daylight match strips I added first we can do the same with the ice blue strip and then the warm white strips the idea here is to have to daylight match strips in the middle followed by two ice blue strips and then two warm white strips to ensure that they never peel away it's a good idea to add some dubs of hot glue to their edges every 15 centimeters or so once they've been added to all of the aluminium box we're almost ready to wire them up before we do this however we need to make some semicircular supports which can be made out of a sheet of low-density PVC plastic this stuff is used for sign making and is fairly inexpensive I have access to a CNC router so I just lazily left it to cut them out for me yay but to make these with basic tools it's almost as easy so to do this you can first mark out a semicircle with a seven centimeter radius and carefully cut it out with a coping saw we need to make some vents in it too to our air to circulate so we can drill six holes in it like so and join the topmost two together with the coping saw and finally we can drill three holes to mount the components in see who needs a CNC now each light needs two of these semicircles and the three component holds on the second one needs to be heavily countersunk for the brightness knobs to later fit into a force in a bit would work great for doing this so - why these up we'll first need a set of three power sockets these can simply be screwed into the holes like so and we need to wire them up in parallel so we can measure out a length of red wire and expose sections of it with some wire cutters and solved with ease to the positive tabs on the power sockets which are the slightly shorter of the two tabs the same can be done with the black wire only this time hooking took to the slightly longer negative taps this whole semicircle can then be attached to the aluminium by screwing into it with self-tapping screws through those holes we made earlier now the negative wire needs to be bent into a circle and sold it up to make it stiff so that it can be slid onto that small screw we added earlier and clamped down with a note this grounds the aluminium allowing us to use it as the negative conductor for the LED dimmers in just a moment the red wire on the other hand can have various sections of it exposed and then these can be sold it to the positive tabs on each of the LED strips like so with the power inputs now sorted we now need to work on the control side so that we can adjust the brightness of each set of color temperature strips for which we'll need three LED dimmers these work by rapidly turning on and off but they operate it's such a rapid rate 10 kilohertz in fact that the flickering is imperceptible to the eye and is in sted perceived as lower brightness it's not visible to cameras either so long as the shutter speed is below one one thousandth of a second these can be mounted onto the other semi circle like so and then wide up to the LED strips this is fairly straightforward but as usual with circuits is better to work off a diagram so I've included one in the video's description once this has been done some knobs can be added and then a 12-volt power adapter can be plugged into any one of the three power sockets after which the dimmers should be able to control each of the color sets individually as you can see they're very bright but as a result they are difficult to look at directly and they leave strong after glows in your eyes even if you glance at them only briefly this makes them uncomfortable to use so we need to diffuse them with a diffusion sheet this stuff is inexpensive and spreads the light over its entire surface making it an order of magnitude easier on the eyes you doesn't block any light it just spreads it out the problem with the Sheep though is this it's really flimsy and floppy so we need to find a way to give it some strength to do this we can use some medium thickness acetate as you can see I've already cooked mine down too much to the height of the lights so the next step is to carefully score a very shallow fold from arc along one side being careful not to cut all the way through now we can get a piece of paper that matches the length of the arch on the semicircle and use it to mark where a second fold line can go which can also be very lightly scored finally about two centimeters up from this second mark we can trim it off completely making it the perfect size for fitting over the lights so to attach this in place we're going to use two strips of low-density PVC plastic the same stuff in fact that was used for making the semi circles now I've drilled holes along their lengths matching the holes in the aluminium which also need to be mirrored on the acetate as well with that done for both sides we can now bend the acetate along the marked grooves so long as the marks are on the outside of the bends it should fold neatly along them without splitting now one side can be placed on the back of the aluminium with one of the PVC strips on top and screwed in place I'm using countersink m4 screws here as they will pull into the PVC and become flush with its surface so before screwing down the other side we need to add the diffusion sheet which first needs to be cut down to match the inside area of the acetate in fact you need to make this about three millimeters thinner overall so that it doesn't crease as it's folded around once this is in place the acetate can be folded over and the other strip can be used to clamp it against the aluminium again using countersink screws to hold it in place to finish things off I added some PVC arches which clamp over the acetate wants group down are then trimmed off any overlapping acetate now adding this acetate covering not only protects the LEDs and diffuses the light but it also makes the entire light rigid and unbendable which is excellent considering they weigh only 700 grams once you've finished the others that can be used to great effect for either home lighting or studio lighting to map them onto a wall you can simply use a couple of nails but if you want to mount them on a light stand it's just a case of making a quick frame out of aluminium angles to which they can be screwed this is also why there's three power sockets on each light as it allows them to be daisy chained together from just one power supply so I hope you've enjoyed this video and if you want to make some of these lights yourself which I hope you do because they are really useful you can find all the links to the stuff needed to make them in the description as well as a link to my patreon account and many thanks if you decide to support me on there but other than that I'm Matt you've been watching DIY perks and I hope to see you next time good bye for now\n"