Portrait Photography Basics: One Light Setups to Make Engaging Portraits

1. Intro : What makes a good portrait? What makes a good photo? How can we interact with light, our subject, and composition to make great images? Hello everyone. My name is Fynn Badgley, I am a commercial fashion and portrait photographer. Today, I am walking you through the basics and fundamentals of lighting the face for portraiture. What you're going to come away with at the end of this course is four different techniques of how you can use a one light setup to light your subject. All of these setups are fairly simple so if you have been intimidated by the idea of studio or artificial lighting, then this course is perfect for you. All of these setups are very simple to understand and even easier to implement in your own space. I will be taking you on location to a studio where I'll be taking these portraits. But the fundamentals and the techniques that I'm going through in this course, you can use in the comfort of your own home with equipment that you have readily available to you. This course is not just for an advanced photographer looking to up their lighting, this course is for just about anyone. If you're just starting out, this will lay a solid groundwork of how to use and understand artificial light, so that way you can take some powerful portraits. If you are a veteran photographer, this course is packed with a bunch of portrait posing tips to get the best expression, and mood out of your subject, how to work with models to really craft an image. No matter if you are a wedding photographer, family portrait photographer or looking to get into headshots or even if you do a lot of beauty work, the techniques that I'm going over in this course will help you no matter where you are in your photography journey. Grab a camera, let's get strapped in, and learn how to take some incredible portraits. 2. Project: Right after that, I want to discuss the project that you will come away with by the end of this course. The Lessons throughout this are designed so that way you can implement the techniques right at your own home. There is no limit to any type of gear that you have to have or anything of that variety. Because I will be using professionally trained models for these examples, that does not mean that you have to the techniques and tips that I'm about to show you. You can use with anybody who is in your life, be it your partner, your children, your best friend, or even if you want to go ahead and take some self-portraits, all of these tips work no matter who you are photographing, so that way you can get the best image possible. As you follow along with the lessons throughout this course, I want you to focus on not only how light is being used, but also the type of lighting technique that you would like to use and implement that in your own work where then after you finish this course or if you would like to do so while following along, you will take a photo of somebody that is close to you in your life using the techniques that I've described, and I look forward to seeing your work down below. I will be active in the discussion, so if you have any questions or anything of that variety, feel free to ask and I will be sure to check it out and answer to the best of my abilities. 3. Equipment: Going ahead now, let's talk about equipment and the gear that I'm going to be using for the duration of this photoshoot that I'm going to be walking you through. My main camera body that I will be using is the Canon EOS R mirrorless camera. Now, this is a fairly new camera to be released, and by no means do you need to use such a camera nor the lenses that I'll be using for it. You can get away with something as simple as your iPhone and utilizing something like a household lamp. Now, that said, the main lens that I will be shooting on is the 24-105 EF mount lens. This is just because as a photographer, personally, my style, I like to move around quite a lot and take some wide shots, take some telephoto shots, and really get a variety in there, and because of that, this is usually my go-to lens. I like to work pretty quickly and it is a very versatile piece of gear that allows me to do just that. Now with that said, you don't need to use a zoom lens or anything like that. You can get away with whatever lens you have readily available to you. This is just my go-to for your reference, so that way you know what the images that you're about to see will be coming out of. Now, as for lighting, this is a one-light setup, and that one like that I will be using is the Flashpoint EPLOR 600 mono light strobe. Basically, this light is self-contained. It is battery-powered, and what I like about that is that it does not have any cords running along the ground or anything like that, that can get in the way. Now, I will be using a octabox for this. Basically, it is a more rounded version of your typical square softbox, and that is just to light the face nice and evenly. Occasionally you will see me use a 5-in-1 reflector in there, and that is just typically what I would use for a setup like this. Now, again, you don't need to use this type of gear, especially if you do not have it readily available, I wanted to make this course as accessible as possible to all of you. Even though I'm in a studio, you are more than able to just set up with a blank wall of any kind of behind your subject, grab something like a household lamp or position them near a window, and then you can also get some white Bristol board foam core, etc, to use as your 5-in-1 reflector. Now that gear is out of the way, I do want to give a quick disclaimer that this course is being recorded on the duration of the COVID-19 pandemic. As such, I'm using all necessary precautions to make sure myself and everyone involved are as safe as possible. You will notice through the behind the scenes content in the studio that I do have a little station ready to go set up with a bunch of sanitization equipment. We're talking hand sanitizer wipes, extra masks, etc. I have been tested and I'm negative prior to the recording of this, so that way there are no issues there. Additionally, the model for this particular course is actually my partner. We live together so we are in the same bubble, further minimizing any possible risk. Also, you will notice even though we are in the same bubble, the studio policy is that anybody who is not on camera, wear a mask. I definitely want to abide by those regulations and as such, and all the behind the scenes content, I will be wearing a mask. If at all is ever hard to understand anything that I might be saying because of that, there are transcriptions available down below next to the description projects tabs that you can see and you can look at those and follow along with the course that way. Just so that way it is nice and accessible for all of you. Without further ado, let's go on location to the studio and create some amazing portraits. 4. Butterfly Lighting: We are here on location at that Toronto studio and I'm joined by Avi. We're going to go through a couple of different lighting setups today to give you guys a lot of tools to lay the groundwork about portrait lighting, especially with artificial light. Today, we're going to be using some strobe, but these two also go across with LEDs or any kind of light that you may have. You can even use something like a household lamp to achieve a lot of these looks, but I have a strobe with a soft box here, so that's what I'm going to use. If you have that lying around, I would suggest you do the same. Now, our first setup is going to be butterfly lighting. This is the signature style that you see with a little shadow underneath the nose and underneath the lip, almost looks like a little butterfly. When you see it, it's very simple, but very effective and great for beauty lighting or any simple portraits like that. I am tethering to the computer so we can see the images coming through. These are all going to be pretty simple one-light setups. The most complicated we might get is adding in some feel, just so that way it gives you guys some tools on how you can play around with this and use it to the best of your ability. Let's get going. Avi, I'll just have you take a couple of steps towards me and almost setting yourself with where the light is. Perfect. Yeah, just like that. Then I'm just going to do a quick lighting test here. Let me just drag the focus point there. Right off the bat, that's looking pretty darn amazing. You can see there's a nice shadow just under the nose that gives that signature butterfly lighting look. That is pretty much exactly what we are going for here. Now, I'm also going to be sharing not just some lighting tips, but also some portrait tips in general. I've worked with Avi many times before, we know each other quite well. With that said, they're going to be giving a lot to me, which makes my job very easy. As we work through our thing, I will be showing you the different things that either they're doing just subconsciously or that I instruct them to do. Beautiful. You can see the benefit of working with somebody who's trained like this. If you notice, every time the camera flashes, Avi is giving a little bit of a head tilt, a little different adjustment. It is always what we love to see. It's a sign of a professional model, basically. Something that takes time to hone and Avi does it beautifully as you will see. Now, right off the bat, we're getting some beautiful expressions here. Avi is giving something that Peter Hurley has called the squinch or you may also have referred to as the smize. As you can see in the photos that are being put up as I'm talking, there's a little bit of a pinch that you're doing with your eyes. How would you describe it would you say? Peter Hurley describes it as bringing your top and bottom lip closer together. It's not a squint, it's more of a pinch. It's just activating a couple of muscles in your eyes. It takes a long time to learn. It's very subtle, but it does make a big difference. Yeah, there you can see. There is. Just on that note, I'm going to take a couple of shots. Why don't you give me some without the squinch and then some with, and we can show everybody the difference. You want to do no squinch first? We'll do no squinch first. Okay. First up, we'll do the no squinch. No squinch. We can see that we get this deer in the headlights look almost. The last one. Now, sometimes for certain shoots, you might be going for this kind of thing, you never know. But just to show you the difference. Now, hit me with the squinch. I'll put those images up here and you can immediately see the massive difference that we're getting between the two shots. It is night and day. The second shot just shows off more confidence. It sells the mood a lot more and really works with that butterfly lighting that we're seeing. Basically, the staple for butterfly lighting is having the light like I have it currently here, which is almost directly in front of and above the subject, so that way it just shines down nicely and creates those nice, subtle shadows. Now, the only thing here is those shadows are fairly prominent and you may not always want them to be. So intense, so I am going to show you quickly that we can lift that up just a little bit if you are looking for more of a subtle look and you don't want such dramatic shadows there. For this, I'm going to be using an old favorite of mine, the 5-in-1 reflector. I'm just going to take the white side. Essentially, what I'm going to do is just place it a little bit below Avi's chin there and it will just gently lift those shadows. Again, we're using the white side here because if we used something like the silver side, we would get a lot more punch out of it, which might be too much for what we are going for for these portraits. I can actually turn on the modeling light here, you'll be able to subtly see the difference if we take it away and if we bring it back. That will just fills in those shadows nicely. Turn the modeling light off and we will take a couple more shots to show you guys the difference here. Beautiful. Yeah, I love that. There we go. I love that. You can tell right away that Avi is really selling a mood and a vibe. It really helps to have a trained professional like that. But if you are not working with a trained professional, some of these tips like the squinch and other tips that I will show you throughout the duration of this course will help you to help people be more confident in front of the camera. Now, you can see that that just makes everything a little more subtle. You can tell right down about here, under the chin and under the nose, you can see the shadows are a lot less pronounced compared to when we didn't have the reflector and those shadows were a lot more intense, as you can see in these images here. The difference is quite intense and you can feather the reflector off if you don't want it to be that intense, but it gives you a way to not have everything as dramatic. Just a way that you can keep things nice and bright and airy if you're going for that beauty look. 5. Loop Lighting: All right/ so now the next setup that we're going to do is something called Loop Lighting. It's one that may be harder to identify, but is also used more commonly than some of these other ones that you may not even notice. What I'm going to do is move away this reflector. We might bring it back later on, but just for the time being. Then we'll just move the light, not completely on the 45-degree angle, but just angling it a little bit, so that way, rather than a butterfly shapes shadow with the cheek under the nose, I should say, we'll get a little subtle shadow right around the corner of the nose, and it won't be so pronounced. It's something very subtle and can be used in a wide variety of applications. We'll take a couple of shots there and show you how that looks. Yeah, there we go. Beautiful. Now we're talking. Yeah, there we go. I love it. You can tell as well as I'm talking, I'm able to hype Ovi up, which just makes them more comfortable and creates overall a very light, comfortable vibe that just makes them know they're doing a good job. That way, they're not sitting here wondering if they're doing what I want them to or if it doesn't look good, because sometimes, some photographers, we can be quiet, and when that happens, sometimes the model will think they're doing something wrong, because you're not giving that positive reinforcement. That's something that I always like to do. No matter who I'm shooting is, if something looks good, I'll make sure to let them know that it looks good. Now, you can see from these images, as we're going along, we're getting that nice subtle shadow just around the nose there. It's not too intense, it's not too pronounced, but it is very subtle. This kind of thing can work very well for beauty shots, fore head shots, and that kind of thing. Now, if we're doing more of a corporate headshot setup, something that I might do is take our reflector again and just bring it to the shadow side of the face, just to fill in those shadows and create a nice flattering look across the face. It'll be really even and it'll look really nice, especially if you're taking any head shots, whether it'll be corporate or for actors, anything like that. Ovi is actually in acting. We've worked together many times. I've shot a bunch of their head shots and I'm sure you would agree this is a very similar setup to what I would regularly do for this kind of thing. Okay. Now we can even turn on our modeling light on our strobe here just to find the best position for this reflector here. We can put it right around there or if we want it a little less dramatically, can pull it back a bit. But I think I want to fill in those shadows are a little bit more, so I will just do it like so. Now that said, you'll also notice a lot of the lights are in the studio currently, and that isn't too much of a big deal for me, because if I turn off the strobe and I take a photo, you will see it is almost completely black. That way there is no ambient light that is interfering with the shot. I have my strobe here bright enough that it overpowers all of that. We're not getting any color cast, we aren't getting any color spill or light spill, or anything like that that we just don't want in our shot. Definitely, if you were shooting in a space like this and you were using LED, say, that maybe aren't quite as powerful, turn off all the lights just to make sure you have even color and there's no light interference there. But because this strobe is powerful enough, we don't really have to worry about that. Going now to show you the difference. I'll bring the reflector in just a little bit. We want to angle it such that the light will come off of the soft box here at a 45-degree angle, bounce off the fill card here, and reflect back into Ovi's face, filling in those shadows quite nicely. If we were to take a shot. Whoa. Make sure your model is ready before you flash them in the face, because nobody wants to have a light go off in their face unexpectedly. I'm ready. Okay. You're ready? Yeah. Okay. You're sure? Yeah. Promise? Yeah. That's also a good way to get people laughing too, especially for head shots or anything like that, is just have fun with it. Maybe joke around a little bit. That thing. When we had the reflector versus where we didn't, you can see how that fills in the face very nicely. I might pull it back just a little bit, just to get a little more shadow, because I think we want a little more definition in there, but it is looking very nice. Okay. Now, with our fill tool back a little bit, we'll take another shot just so that way. The shadows are a little more pronounced, but not too much. Beautiful. Yeah, I love that. Another thing that I find Ovi is very skilled at is making a natural looking smile or laugh. Now, one way that I've seen people do it and I myself, whenever I have done modeling or anything like that, have done it, I've used, it's almost like pushing out a small laugh. I don't know if you would agree with it. Yeah, forcing yourself to laugh a little bit. Yeah, exactly. Then pushing that out gives you a very natural smile. A good photographer will see that exact moment of when to capture that and it will give you the most natural, incredible looking smile. If you want people to look natural and happy in their photos, that's the way to do it. We can see the difference of pulling that film back just a little bit. It just brings those shadows out a little bit more there. They're not too pronounced, but they're not completely erased, and that is a way that you can utilize Loop Lighting and really get some amazing beauty shots or head shots. This is a very versatile lighting setup. We've got one light, we've got a reflector here. It's pretty simple, but you can use it for a variety of applications. Now, we're going to go to another famous lighting setup, made famous by the painter Rembrandt, made famous for the triangle of light, and I'm about to show you how you get that. 6. Rembrandt Lighting: - [MUSIC] Now, for this next setup, we have moved to the reflector away and we're going to get more pronounced shadow. As we're going down the list of lighting setup here, the shadows across the face are becoming more pronounced and a little more dramatic. As you've seen in this next setup, I'm going to move the light such that it is around a 45-degree angle. Then what ideally we want to happen is we'll get a little triangle of light just on obvious left cheek here. That way, it creates this very flattering light that's quite dramatic and can be really good for some dramatic portraits, but can also be used for dramatic beauty work or anything like that as well. Let's turn on our modeling light here. We can gauge where that triangle of light will fall. I think right about there will be good. But we'll take a test shot just to see, and then we will go from there. Here we go. You ready? - Yes. - Okay. Don't want flashing the face by accident. [LAUGHTER] [NOISE] Okay. Beautiful. Now, I think we can get it a little more pronounced. You can see that triangle of light is starting to come through. But I think we can get it a little more pronounced. What do you think? Yes. I bring the light just around a little bit more. It's almost completely to obvious side. However, we have a very large light source in comparison to obvious face currently. Ideally, what's going to happen is, this is a very soft light source that will cascade along obvious face and the edge of the softbox here will just catch the cheek and it will create that little triangle of light that we are looking for. I'm going now to take a shot. [NOISE] We see, and we pretty much have it bang on. You can see in the images that I'm putting out right now, we have that nice little triangle of light. It's not too dramatic, but it's also not too subtle or anything. It can be done for some really dramatic portraits, especially if you're trying to show the character in somebody or trying to bring out a certain emotion of somebody, especially if it's more of a serious portrait. This is a fantastic and simple lighting setup that you can use to create that. Something like this can also be even replicated with a window. If you were to place somebody at an angle of a window such that the window is on their side and you haven't turned towards it just a little bit, you'll get a very similar look. This doesn't need to be done with expensive studio lighting. You can do this in your own home with a window or even a household lamp if you put it on the right direction. Now, we'll take a couple more. [NOISE] Beautiful. [NOISE] I love that. Yes, there we go. That's like a portion out a lot that we were talking about. That's how you do it. [NOISE] Then you can see it's also giving me a lot of range in their expression. That way, I get a lot of different types of photos out of it, and we just get a lot of variety, and everything is more dynamic. It's something that I always love about working with them. They give a luck to me. They make my job very easy. Now, something that you can do if your subject isn't quite as talented, you can direct them and say, put your face this way, that way, or what have you. Or a better way to go about it, is give them an action and a vibe that you're going for if you want a more serious dramatic portrait because you're doing a more dramatic lighting setup. You can let them know that. Every time the flash goes off, you can tell them just do a subtle movement of the face like you will notice Abby has been doing. As I've been shooting, we've been moving their head, moving their chin, everything like that. You can at first instruct the model on how to do that. Then as you get going, they should get more comfortable, and then it'll be easier as you go. It is also better if you just have a regular conversation with them and take photos. As you're going along, it will make them more comfortable versus you silently just taking photos and then hoping everything looks good. It always creates a bit of awkwardness there. Just have a conversation with the person. Even if you know them really well, maybe ask them some unconventional questions, that's a good way to get a laugh of a somebody if you want them laughing. Or if not, you can just get that out of there and then having everybody laugh. It creates a lot of warmth and just eases the tension in the room. Then that way, they can settle back down, get more serious, and give you exactly what you're looking for. I think we're looking pretty good here. Now, something like this. I personally almost wouldn't like to add a film just because it works very well for that dramatic portrait. Now, something that you can do to emphasize the drama here is to have Abby stand on a bit of an angle. Now, have your right shoulder towards me. Exactly. Yeah. Bring your chin over your shoulder like that and I'll have you looking towards the camera but giving that very serious look, almost instilling power and a lot of confidence, and almost authority. You can tell I'm giving Abby directions based on a mood to sell me, especially because Abby is an actor, that gives him a lot to work with versus giving him specific instructions. I don't want it to feel robotic. I want it to feel natural and fluid. Now, because they've moved a little bit, so your face, rather than being straight on, is now bit of an angle. I will just change the light very slightly. That way, we are still getting that famous Rembrandt triangle of light there. Now, I'll just take couple of shots like this. [NOISE] Beautiful. We'll take a couple more, I'd like to just get you to turn slightly this way. Perfect, right there. [NOISE] Beautiful. You can tell Abby really giving me that intensity that I'm looking for. It's always good to let your model know what you're wanting out of the shots so that way, they can give it to you better. We can see the triangle of light there is a little more subtle, but it does land to a very dramatic, personalized, really characterized shot. Wouldn't you agree? Yes. Now, with that done, we're going to go to the last setup, which is going to be the most dramatic, the most intense, and the most specialized. [MUSIC] 7. Split Lighting: Now we are on our last setup here, the fourth and final one light setup. What we are looking at now is called split lighting, and that is where you get half of the side of the face that is properly exposed and the other half that is in shadow. Now, we are working with a large soft box here, so I'm thinking some of it might fall off on the face, and if that happens, I will show you what to do at that time. We'll move the light into position here. That's not too close at all, is it? Cool. I just like asking little questions like this to make sure whoever I'm working with is as comfortable as possible. Like I've said before, I always like to make sure my models are comfortable with anything that I have in my head or I'm going to do. I always like to ask them beforehand if they're comfortable with whatever I do, especially if it's somebody that I haven't worked with before. Just in general across the board say if I want to adjust the clothing on somebody or anything like that, I just like to make sure that okay, are you comfortable with doing that? That way everybody is comfortable and feels respected. I know I have said comfortable a lot, but I just want to emphasize that everybody feels good and feels respected, so that way everybody is happy and goes home fulfilled at the end of the day, and doesn't have any awkwardness or negative feelings around that. That is something that I hope you can do with your models as well, you just make them feel as at home as possible. We will just really made sure that they are comfortable. Now let's get into the shot here. Again you'll notice that in tethering to the computer, I have it so that Ovi can see himself. Make sure that they are happy with images and how they are turning out, and if they want to adjust anything of them-self, they can see it and correct that as they'd go, rather than showing the back of the camera every so often unable to see the images as they're coming in, I'll check every now and then, but they don't have a reference, so this gives them that nice reference point, and they can make sure that they're happy with how the images are turning out as well. We will get this split lighting setup going here. Right off the back, we can see that is pretty dramatic, it is the most dramatic of the setups we've had so far. There is less light on the background which already is creating a little bit more drama, but we have a lot of shadow going on there. However, because it is such a large light source and it is close to our subject, we still get a nice catch light in the eyes, I always like having that little bit of light in the eyes, just so that way everything looks nice and alive. If you keep that catch light out of somebody's eyes, sometimes they look a little lifeless, I would say. Just having that little bit of light in there creates a lot of mood, and lets you connect to the person on the other side of the camera. Now, with this setup, we are still getting just a little bit of light on that corner of the cheek there. Previously I've used a 511 reflector to add light into the side of the face, but this time I'm actually going to flip it around and use the black side of the reflector to actually take away light. That black will absorb the light, and hopefully take out that triangle that's on the cheek there, because this is a split lighting setup, we want to be as dramatic as possible. [inaudible] we've already visited, we don't need to go back there, so we will get back going. I have my negative fill as we call it, rather than fill, that were filling in the shadows, were taking it away, so that is why they call it negative fill. With the black side here, I'm just going to bring it up and have it such that it should reduce the light coming out of the soft box and we'll get rid of that little bit of light that's peeking through onto Ovi's cheek there. Another thing I can do is just shift the light a little bit away, and then that way it won't quite give as much light to that side of the face and it should do the trick here. Going to take another shot, we wind it up, beautiful, yeah. Give me really intense almost staring, yeah, there we go. Beautiful, I love it. Now almost give me like a sinister vibe, yeah, that little smirk is perfect, I love it. Beautiful, yeah, I love that. We can see there, as we're going through the images, that negative fill did do quite a bit, but I think we can play with our light a little bit more to just have it be a little more dramatic. As you will notice, when I was directing Ovi, I was giving him a lot of directions like cower, and kind of being that sinister vibe, and that is because this is a very dramatic type of lighting. This is something that will give a lot of drama, and that dark side of things. If you're doing a portrait that is that dark vibe or very moody, this is something that you would want to use for that. I'm just going to move the light a little bit, I'm actually going to bring it around, almost back-lighting them a little bit, and then that way we are getting less light falling off on the front of the face here. Are you okay if I move this a little bit? I'll just bring our negative fill in a little bit more, so that way we start taking that light away. I'll turn the modeling light on just to see what we're looking at here, and bring it back behind a little bit more. We can see that's actually going to do quite a lot to cancel that out. Another thing we can do, I'm just going to move the light down a little bit, just bring it closer to their level, just so that way we're not getting the light coming off of the eyebrow and the nose there filling in that cheek. This way, we're not getting any of that and we can have it be nice and dramatic like that. Going now to take a shot. There we go. Now we can see, we're still getting that catch light in the eye, so it isn't nice and subtle. By feathering the light a little bit more towards them so it's a bit of a back-light, we're losing a little bit more light on the background, thus making it more dramatic still, and between our position of the light and adding the negative fill here, we have completely countered out the left side of your face, giving us a classic split lighting scenario. Now I'm going to work with Ovi and we're going to get that really sinister expression going, to create some really moody portraits. Alright, yeah, so just give me that really sinister, cynical look there. Yeah, beautiful. It's like you staring through my soul, I love it. Beautiful, I love that. You can see, if Ovi is doing something that is more joyful, something more intense, they are still adding in that squinch in there like we talked about earlier, because it really can sell the vibe no matter what. If you're looking for a happier shot, it'll really give you that and give you it in the eyes, but if you're looking for something more intense and sinister, it'll also give you that, and you can tell in their eyes that they put that through, which is why I tell them the mood that I'm going for so that way they can sell that. If you give somebody a story to work off of, they are not so much posing, and they're more acting. It gives them something to act out, and gives them more of an action rather than just a simple instruction that they don't have a lot to work with there. When you're working with your portrait subjects, I always find it easier to direct them in a more broad sense, and let them go with it as they will, and maybe if you want specific things, just adjust them as they go and everything should work a lot better for that. I think we've got some pretty good portraits. Now, we will go over to the editing room, and we will take a look at these guys, and see how we can play with them after the fact to emphasize that light and really make these images pop. 8. Review: We're back from the studio and that shoot went very well. AVI did an amazing job as always, and if you want to see more, either from that Toronto studio or from AVI themselves, their links will be in the notes of this course. Now I hope you gained a lot of value out of that and seen the versatility that you can have with a fairly simple one light setup and how you can transition that from, say, beauty work to head shots to something a little more dramatic, like a very intense portrait, no matter what the application, you now have these techniques that you can go off with and create some amazing portraits of anyone you may come in contact with. Now, with that in mind, let's jump over to the computer where we're going to sort through these images. I will show you what I look for when narrowing down my selection to a few images to edit, and then we will go through the actual editing process and show you how I would approach images like that that we took at the studio. 9. Edit Part 1 - Selecting Images and Lightroom Adjustments: Here we are in Lightroom and we can see all the photos that we have taken from our session in the studio with Avi here. We got our first setup being the butterfly lighting and we can see as we're going through the difference that as we were talking about that idea of the squinch. We can see the difference it makes of that deer in the headlights look versus when you add that squinch in and how it just adds that level of confidence in there. Then as well, we can also compare the difference of when we added in that fill to when we did not have it. You can see down here beneath the chin as well as under the lip there and under the nose. You can see the shadows are a lot more pronounced when we did not have the reflector versus when we had it in there. We can see that signature butterfly shape under the nose there. As we're going through, you get the difference setups as we get into the loop lighting and what have you. I'm going to go through select a couple of these. Basically what I'm looking for when I'm going through these images is expression, something that shows me that there's something going on there, whether it's in the eyes, in the smile, or just in the overall expression itself for our butterfly lighting. I like this one quite a lot, so I'm going to rate that as a five. Then we'll come back and have these altogether and then that way there's a nice selection of a few of them there. Now this is our loop lighting setup. I'm just going to go into where we added that reflector in so that way we can get a nice headshot [inaudible] image. I like this one here. There's nice catch lights in the eye. It's a nice natural smile, so I'll rate that one a five. This is just to give you an idea of what I'm looking for and how I go about coloring these photos. Now as we're going along, we're getting into the more dramatic lighting setups and now we're on to the Rembrandt lighting and can see Avi. We got them laughing, here's that. Has some great images taking place there. But I like that more dramatic look. I like the smolder there. Maybe we'll rate that one a five. But I also like these more profile images where their shoulder was more towards the camera and then they just brought that chin around like we saw in the actual shoots. I like this one quite a bit, I would say. So that guy is a five there. Then now to our final setup, we'll go to the spot lighting. You can see when we started out it was still a little bit of that Rembrandt look and then we added in that negative feel and then we see how it's taken away any additional light hitting the camera right side of the face. I think I like this image quite a lot. It's very moody, it's very dark. It has a lot of intensity there. We're still getting a little bit of light in the eyes there so we can tell it doesn't fade completely to black, but we are still getting that drama there. I will rate that one a five as well. Come over here, turn on Rated, go to five stars and we can see our five different images here. Out of these two, I think personally I like this image a little bit more. I'll just take this one out of the running and then that way we're just focusing on one image per setup. As we go, we'll start off and edit the butterfly lighting shot. This looks a little bit overexposed for my liking, so we'll bring it down about half a stroke or so. Right about there seems nice. We'll bring down the highlights just a little bit because we were getting a little bit of a bright spot on the forehead there and on the cheeks, so just bringing that down a bit. We'll bring up the shadows just a little bit to brighten up some of those shadow areas and let's see. I don't really like to touch the clarity sliders or anything like that, especially when I'm doing a portrait just so that way the skin tones remain nice and clear and it's not grainy or anything like that. Now as far as vibrance or anything goes, I'm feeling pretty happy with how we're looking. I will give a very slight s-curve, like I like to do with a lot of my images. I just feel it helps give it an overall finished, polished look. You can see it's a very subtle change, but it just smooths everything out a little bit. Now I think I want to keep it pretty simple for these edits. That's what I'm going to do there and then we'll go to the next image because this is a more brighter, happier shot, something like a headshot thing for either actors or if it's a corporate headshot thing like that for lawyers, etc. We'll see what the previous settings do. I think that is quite underexposed for what we want. We'll reset our exposure there and maybe bring down the highlights a little bit more and I think that's looking pretty good. Can see the difference between the two. Maybe we want to warm this one up just a little bit and then we'll take, the skin is a little more magenta in this shot you can see compared to that guy there, just based on how the light was and anything like that. We will take a little bit of that magenta away, just take some of the redness out of the skin there. You want always your skin to look nice and natural and clean. You don't want it too red or anything like that. Just keeping it nice and natural there. Maybe we'll go down here to our HSL tab. That stands for Hue Saturation and Luminance. We'll take the reds and just make them a little, just a touch more towards the orange side, just so keeping it nice and natural and that way our images are uniform across the set of photos that we're looking at here. Now we'll go over to our next shot. In this one, on the side of the face here, we're getting quite a bright spots. When we bring down the highlights that should even out nicely and just like I thought it did. Just that, we might want to bring it up just a little bit more there and you can see we are getting that triangle of light on the camera right side here on that opposite cheek and it's looking pretty darn nice. We're getting a nice catch light in the eyes here, making it look nice and lively. Now when we bring these images into the Photoshop in a minute, we will get rid of things like some of the lint on the shirt and a little bit of that little red fluff there, all that kind of stuff. This is also why it's handy to keep something like a lint roller or something like that on you onset just in case there's any lint or anything like that, you can get rid of that without needing to fix it in post. Now going on to our final image, we are getting a bit of that bright spot as well here and I think when we bring the highlights down, evens it out pretty nicely. It's not overly distracting, I don't think. Initially, I think it was a little distracting, but then when we bring those highlights down, it does even out nicely and we're getting a nice moody portrait there. With that in mind, we are going to now jump over to Photoshop where will open all of these guys and to give a quick little edit, maybe some skin retouching and just show you how to make everything pop a little bit. 10. Edit Part Two - Fine Retouching: Now we're in Photoshop here and I just like to go to Lightroom and use edit in under the photo. We'll just edit in Adobe Photoshop 2020, and that opens this guy. Now for the purposes of this, we will just be editing the one portrait and the settings that we're going to use for this will transfer over to all of our other photos as well. Right off the bat, I'm going to give you a quick rundown of how I do skin retouching being the frequency separation method. If you haven't heard of it, it's a very widely used and the gold standard of skin retouching. I duplicated our background layer twice here. I'll turn the top layer off and go down to the middle layer here. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go to Filter, Blur, Gaussian Blur. We want about between 3 and 4 is where I like to keep it for any kind of portraits or anything like that. Then we're going to activate our top layer there again. Now you're probably looking at this and thinking it that why are we doing it this particular way it will work out, at firs it doesn't seem like it's going to do anything, but trust me, it will work out in the end. With our top layer here, we're going to go up to our blend mode. We're going to go down and select Linear Light here. Then from there we'll go up to our Image tab up top, go to Apply Image. There's a couple of specific settings that you'll want here. Feel free to get a notebook or something like that and write these down, especially if you've been taking notes throughout the duration of this. So we'll go. We need to select Layer 1 and that's going to base it off that layer. That's why we threw the blur on there. Then we're going to do that and it still doesn't look good at all and that's okay. It's meant to look like that, we'll change our blending mode here to subtract. This is very specific. We want the scale to be at 2 and the offset to be at 128. I don't know why those numbers are what they are. That is just how it is for this technique. We'll apply that. You can see if we group those together. We'll just call it skin. When we group those together, it looks like nothing has changed and that's because nothing has, because we haven't actually got into the retouching yet. We'll select our layer here. Basically what we're doing here is separating the color of the skin from the texture. Our top layer here, we can even rename that to texture, and then this guy will be our color layer. We'll come down here and we'll want to grab our lasso tool for this, come up, and any spot that is similar in color like under the eyes here, we'll just highlight and select with our lasso there. We'll just give it a couple hits of the Gaussian blur there. I'm editing on a Mac currently, so I'm just using command Control F, and that is using the same filter I previously applied. Again, you want that blur around 3-4 or so and we're just selecting any area that is similar in color. This isn't going to affect the texture at all. It is just blending the color of the skin together to smooth everything out a little bit and everything to look a little more blended and flattering. We'll just come in here, maybe feather into a bit of the color that it's bordering onto. I have my feathers set at seven pixels, just so that way it blends out nicely around the edges there. We'll just go through and do this over pretty much all the spots. Get the neck as well while we're at it because we don't want to forget about that. Nothing looks worse than when you have somebody's face beautifully retouched and then you forget about their neck or their arms, legs, anything like that. Then it's a telltale sign that you did some retouching but you didn't get it all the way there. Again, selecting a similar color area there and blending it all in together. Now if you want to be more precise, you can select smaller areas of skin. This is partially for demonstration purposes, so I am going a little bit faster than I regularly would. For these kind of head shoddy portraits, anything like that, I don't typically do too much retouching. I like to keep it fairly minimal and natural. Now with the color dark width, we're going to select our clone stamp tool and we want to be on the current layer. If we do current and below, like we usually do, you'll see it is not going to really turn out how we want and we get that funky spot there. We'll just go to current layer and any little areas. This is just to blend in any skin texture. Copying from somewhere a little smoother and then blending over into some of the slightly rougher areas. We'll have you just to keep everything more uniform now, especially on portraits. Whenever it's not like a super fashion image or anything like that, I do like to keep the skin quite natural and true to life. Then that way too, it still looks like the actual person you're photographing. You don't want it to look too robotic or plastic or anything like that. We're just going along. I do have my opacity set around 70 percent, just so that way it mostly will cover it, but there's still a bit of blending going on there. I'll just finish up in some of these areas. Just blend them in a little bit and make them a little subtler. You don't need to go too crazy or anything like that at all. Now, that looks pretty good for where we are currently. We'll just zoom out and I can show you the difference before and after, and if at all you think it's a little drastic or anything like that, you can just drop the opacity down. I like a good 20 percent or so. I always think that keeps everything looking nice and natural, especially when we're talking about skin, where it's easy to overdo things. With that said, and now I am going to do a little clean up of the shirt here and just make sure there's no crazy lint or anything like that. That's why I'm going to change this to Current & Below. I've changed the opacity to 100. Make the hardness a little bit lower, so that way everything is nice and blended. We're just going to take some of the shirt and just clone out any lint filled areas, anything like that and just overall tidy things up. This is going to take me a moment. I'm just going to speed it up here. Bear with me. That looks pretty good for now. You can see that I tried to keep some of the texture of the shirt in there so that way it's not all just a blobby mess of darkness there. Usually any shoot like this, I would use a lint roller and take care of all of those things. But I chose not to just to make sure that I could show you how to remove that if you did not have access to lint roller or anything like that. Now, another thing that I like to do with my portraits is just to refine things a little bit with some dodging and burning. Usually what I'll do is I'll create a darkened curves layer. Then I just hit command "Delete" to invert that guy and make it completely black. I like to name them contour, but this is essentially our burn layer. Then we're going to have a lighter layer, which is going to be our dodge layer or highlight as I like to describe it. Then again, we'll hit command "Delete" and invert that guy. We're back down to our contour layer here. Can hit "B" for the brush tool and we have a very low flow. Flow basically as you go over top of it, it will layer over top of itself rather than opacity, you will need to keep clicking down. I just want to emphasize the jaw line a little bit there. Let's bring it out a little bit. Basically, all I'm doing is emphasizing some of the already natural features that you're seeing here. Maybe if that ear back here is a little bright, I'll go over that a little bit. Darken it down just to bring some of the focus back on the foreground. Darken the temple just gives some marsh shape in there. I'll just come over here and add some depth and dimension maybe contour the hairline a little bit like so. Avi has a great shaped nose. We'll just emphasize that a little bit more. We'll come over here and turn this guy on and off. You can see it's a fairly subtle change, but it does make a nice difference. If it's a little drastic again, we can just bring that opacity down there. You can see the difference, it's a little better like that. Now we go over to the highlight layer. Sometimes if you feel so inclined, you can bring a little bit back to the eye, make it brighter. I like to put a little highlight on the opera brow bone there. Just make it brighter, stands out a little more. If you are shooting a subject who has any dark circles or anything like that and you want to get rid of that, you can just gently put a little bit of that under the eye and just lift it. I'll put more there too, emphasize that red brown triangle of light a little more. I'll come over here since we countered the nose before, we'll just add a little bit of highlight, making the bridge vet a little more prominent. We'll maybe add a little bit of highlight to the lips there, add some to the chin. Basically, we're just shaping the face a little bit more and evening everything out. Making things look a little more, "chiseled," if you will say now. You can see will turn that guy on and off again. Again, a subtle difference. Maybe we'll bring the opacity down about 70 percent. Turn that on and off and you can see it just makes everything pop out a little bit more. That is a very simple, quick edit for any portrait that you're doing, especially if it's a headshot or something like that. Going easy on the skin retouching, again, if this was fashion image, I might go more intense, but I do want to keep this true to the person, especially because this particular setup would be more of something that you're doing, either of capturing the person's personality or just trying to really show their essence as it were. I don't want to erase too much of them. I still want to keep and the way they naturally are in there. We can see we'll just hit "Alt Our Option" and click here to deselect everything. We can see it's a fairly subtle edit, but those subtle changes make a big difference. You can take these techniques, apply them to your portraits. I think you'll be very happy with the results that you get. Something like this. I wouldn't put too much of a color grade or anything like that on. I like to keep it fairly simple and minimal and usually any kind of color grading or anything like that. I like to reserve more for more creative or advertising or editorial images rather than something of more a simple portrait. I think we are about good here. 11. Conclusion: If you have been following along up until this point, I wanted to thank you very much for your time and watching through the duration of this course. I hope you gained a lot of value out of the techniques that I have shown you throughout the lessons here. All of these techniques, I've used throughout my professional career in a number of different applications and this is a solid groundwork that you can build upon to create really engaging portraits. As you add more lights, as you get more comfortable working with different subjects, you will create a really solid portfolio of some amazing and inspiring portraiture. I'm greatly looking forward to the work that all of you create, and I look forward to seeing it down in the project section down below. If you have enjoyed the content that you saw today, feel free to follow me along on here as I will be posting various other in-depth photography-related courses, as well as some film making courses. If you did not know, I am also very proficient in the film making space. Additionally, if you would enjoy some more bite-size content, I also do have a YouTube channel which will be linked both in the notes of this course and in my profile. If that interests you, feel free to follow me along there as I will be sharing more bite-size photography and film-related videos there. Thank you so much again, and I hope you have an amazing and very creative day.