I took and older image which has one spotlight with the blinds gel applied to it. I was trying to use soft shadows to soften up the sharp shadow on the wall but it does not work. I also tried the shadow buffer and that doesn't effect it either. Am I correct to assume that you can't use soft shadows / shadow buffer with gels?

Hello TK, You will actually need to create a gel with soft edges. The soft shadows option only works with light/object interactions. Carrara doesn't consider the gel an actual object since it is only 'reading' the color and value information in the blind or art file that you are using as a gel. Just grab your favorite drawing program and create some lines with soft edges. The issue with a fuzzy gel, though, is that it uniformly fuzzy the way it was uniformly sharp previously. In real life, the futher away from the window you get, the fuzzier the shadows become. Truly, the best way is to create some blinds and keep them as a stock object in the object tray so you can pull it out when you need it. However, for most stuff, a simple blurred line pattern art file works ok. Mark

Thanks Mark.

This is way I love this forum. I fallow Marks suggestion and run this test just to see how it works. I cheated a bit and used the C3 Wizard to get the room, then I modified the lighting a bit and applied a Gel to one of the existing lights using Marks recommendations and this is the result. Gels certainly have their place. C3 rendered this very quickly.