Studio Lighting II: Advanced Lighting Techniques

1. Introduction: My name is J. P. Denko, and this is studio lighting to advance lighting techniques. This is the second class in a five class studio lighting Siri's. So in the first class, we learned how to take a one light studio portrait. And we also learned how to get her flash off camera, how to trigger a flash off camera about different light modifiers and how we could change the quality of her life. And in this class, we're gonna build on all of those techniques that we learned in the first class. And we're gonna make things just a little bit more complex. So we're gonna go through three completely different lighting setups, complete studio lighting setups from start to finish. The 1st 1 is we're going to do a classic three light studio portrait. This is a really, really adaptable technique that once you learn how to do a three light studio portrait, you can adapt this to almost any photography setting in studio natural light. It doesn't matter. The concepts and the techniques and your learned for the three light studio portrait are adaptable to almost everything that you're gonna take a picture of the second technique that we're gonna learn is a clamshell studio portrait. And this is a really kind of ah beauty technique that you see in a lot of fashion and Glamour magazine's. It looks really great with women, and it gives you a very, very different look to your photography. The third type of studio lighting set up that we're gonna cover is a rim lit portrait. So this is a look that you'll often see with sports magazines. It looks really, really good with athletic people where you're trying to show off the muscles and curves of the body, and it also looks great with boudoir photography. So if that's something you're interested in, you really, really want to check out how to do a rim lit portrait in studio. So what I'm really excited about this class is that we're also going to use three completely different light sources. So we're gonna use regular old hardware stored led light bulbs, and I'm gonna show you how to get great results with those. We're also gonna use hot shoe flash, which you might be familiar with from the first class, and at the end, I'm also gonna bring out my studio strobes, so you'll see an example with full blown studio gear. So the cool thing about all that is, you'll get to see how I work with different light sources, and you should be able to adapt that to your own photography so that you could work with whatever the gear that it is that you have available. We're also gonna go through a quick edit of one of the photos sold, take you through a post processing workflow using light room and at the end of the class, I've got a bit of surprise for you as well, so I've got a little bit of a bonus lesson. So I really hope that you're ready to enroll in the class, Click and roll and let's get started. 2. Lights & Modifiers: Now, before we jump right into the lighting setups for the class, let's just take a few minutes to quickly go through some of the gear that we're gonna use. So first of all, I'm gonna use my old Nikon D 200 DSLR camera with the kit lens. It's an 18 to 55 millimeter F 3.5 to 5.6 kit lens. So this is pretty much the most inexpensive DSLR and lens combo you confined. Now I am going to use a little bit of a higher quality lens for the first photo for the hot light three light portrait set up. So for that, I'm gonna use a Sigma 50 millimeter f one point for art Siri's lens. And the reason I'm using this lens for that portrait is because with the hot lights, I can shoot at a much wider open aperture so I can shoot F 1.4 or F 2.8 and I can get more light into this lens into my camera. Andi, I don't have to use his high heaven. I s O and I get better. Boca. Now, if you don't have quite a lens that goes to F 1.4 or even F 2.8 you can use. You know any lens that you have, Even the kit lens would work fine. You just have to increase the I s a little bit to compensate. And also with our three light classic studio portrait, we're gonna is going to use our shoot through umbrella. So you should recognize this from the first class. It's the same shoot through umbrella that we used for the clamshell portrait. Instead of using hot lights, I'm going to use three hot shoe strobes. So these air my Nikon SB 100 hot shoe strobes. I've had these for years. You could still pick them up, used online. We're gonna trigger these just with RPC Sync cable and also with the built in optical slave sensor. And for that clamshell portrait, we're going to use the shoe through umbrella again. And I'm also going to use my last delight 24 inch by a 24 inch small soft box. So again, we have seen this already in the in the first portrait lightings Siri's And finally, for the rim light portrait. I'm gonna use my studio strobes So this is an Ellen Chrome Quadra. It's ah, battery powered studio strobes, so it's really just like an oversized hot shoe flash, but it allows you to use a little bit bigger light modifiers. And for my light modifiers for the room lit portrait, I'm gonna use the Ellen Chrome Quadra with a set of strips off boxes. So this is a 48 by 16 inch strips, soft box with an egg crate grid on it. So this allows you to get really, really tight control of your lighting when you're doing a portrait in a really small space like this. And as you can see, we're back in my basement studio here, I'm working with, like a you know, 6.5 foot ceiling height. I really have minimal space around me for the backdrop. Amusing. This is a Westcott onyx. It's ah, it's a really, really nice backdrop, really, like using it gives a nice damask pattern. Look, um, so that's pretty much it for the gear that we're gonna use in the class now. Don't think that you have to use exactly what I'm using. Pay more attention to the techniques in the light modifiers and how they work not specifically about what the light sources are And, uh, the gear that I'm using so you can adapt what I'm gonna do to pretty much any gear that you might have yourselves. If you have any questions about the gear that I'm using or how you might be able to adapt your own gear to the class, please leave a comment in the comments area there, and I will answer you. And hopefully we can get you set up so you can work with your own lighting and get your class assignment in. 3. Classic 3 Light Studio Portrait: for first set up. I'm gonna take you through a standard three light portrait set up, um, for the lights for this portrait, I'm just gonna use standard hardware store led light bulbs so amusing what we call hot lights These lights air, not strobes there on all the time. And I'm really excited about this set up because when I started my career photography, this is exactly how I let everything I got a set of 500 watt hell gin work lights and using those you know, I just kind of learned how to light my subjects in light rooms in different areas. So, you know, this is exactly how I got started. And I think it's really exciting what you can achieve with just really inexpensive hardware store lightbulbs for our key light on using a shoot through umbrella. And this is a 17. What led spotlight with a 40 degree angle beam in a high color rendition. Indyk index. So it's a high c r I bulb. Now, the most important thing here is not so much the bulb. It's that I'm using a shoot through umbrella as my light modifier to defuse my light and give a much more pleasing light on my subject for my feel light. I've just got another led spotlight. I This one's a little bit more diffused. It's 100 10 degree beam angle, but it's in a socket and it's just on top of a light stand. So depending on how bright I want to use have my fill light to fill the shadows on the dark side of her face. I can move that forward or back and then for my hair light, which is also acting as a background light in this case. Now, um, the three lights that we're using is the key light, filleted and hair light. But depending on what you're actually lighting where you're shooting, you might need an extra light to specifically to light your background. But in this case, this lights going to do both jobs there. So this light is just, um, in one of those aluminum work light holders, and I've got it clamped up here on the ceiling. So that light is just gonna like the back of her head and give some separation between my model in the background, and it's gonna throw just enough light onto the background as well to give us a nice background light. So now let's go through each light and what they do and how to set up your camera. So to get started, our first light that we're looking at is our key light. That's the most important late in the set up And what we're gonna set all our other lights to and our camera's settings so you can see depending on which direction she's facing, how the quality of light affects their model there. But working with that nice shoot through umbrella, we've got a relatively soft, interesting light. So I'm gonna set my camera settings based on that key light. So the first thing you do is set my, uh, image quality. So I'm gonna set this toe raw because I always want to be working with raw files so I can adjust them in post next. I'm gonna set my eyes. So now, even though that light looks pretty bright, I know that it's really not nearly as bright as a strobe. So I'm going to start with I s 0 400 Working with hot lights are probably gonna be working with ISOS of 408 100 or 1600 depending on how fast of a lens that you're using. But in this case, let's start with eso 400. Next, I'm gonna set my white balance now on the box for these lights there they say they're they're daylight white balanced. And the box says that their balance to 5000 Kelvin. So I'm gonna go into the settings for white balance and set it to Kelvin, and then I'm going to set the color temperature to 5000 Calvin. So now the color temperature that my camera is set to matches the color temperature of my lights, And that's really important when you're using hot lights, because you have to make sure that all the lights in your in your set up have the same white balance. So if you're using one light that's set to daylight in one light that's set to a warm white or a tungsten, you're gonna have to completely different late colors, and you might not even be able to tell that to the naked eye. But on camera you'll be able to see the difference, so just make sure that all your lights are the same light color. So next I'm going to set my camera settings, aperture and shutter speed based on the relative brightness of my key light. Because it's a hot light. I can't change the power of that light. I don't have a dimmer, so I'm gonna use my camera to get the right exposure. So let's get started. I'm going to start with, UM, F 2.8 and 11 25th of a second. And let's see how that looks. So you can see immediately that that's too dark, the hissed, a gram shifted way over to the left, and it's it's just overall too dark. When I'm setting this exposure, I want us. I want to look at the closest part of her forehead here. That's the closest to the key light. So the lights leaving the key light and that will be the brightest part of her face. So I want to set my exposure from right here. So let's try decreasing the shutter speed down to 1/60 of a second. Now, if your handheld like I am right now, 1/60 of a second is the slowest shutter speed that you can really use if you got your camera on a tripod, you can go down to an eighth of a second, even with a live subject. But handheld, 1/60 of a second is probably about the women. So I'm at 1/60 of a second in F 2.8 and I s 0 400 It's getting better, but again, you can see it's too dark. So let's, um, increase my eyes. So up to I s 0 800 So that looks pretty good to me. I'm at 1/60 of a second F 2.8 and I s 0 800 Now, when this lens this is a really fast lens, it's a Sigma 50 millimeter. 14 I can actually go down to 1.4 f 1.4 and see what it looks like with just a one more stop of light. Now, looking at that photo, you can tell right away that it's too bright. So we've got we've overexposed the highlights here on this side of her face. And also, if you look at the history Graham on the right, um, we're clipping the highlights so we know that that's too bright. So let's go back, Teoh One, stop lower! Now, instead of decreasing the f stop, I'm gonna keep it F 1.4 for this lens because one of the big advantages of using hot lights is that you can actually shoot wide open with with a wider big aperture. So I'm gonna decrease the Isoda 400 I think that will be the exposure of my key light. Yeah, that looks good. So I s 0 400 F 1.4 and 1/60 of a second. Now, I've got my key light set, and I've got my camera setting set up to the key light. Now, we're gonna look at our feel like so you can see that the fill light is not as bright as the key light. Um, but all I want my feel like to do is fill in the shadows the deep, dark shadows on the dark side of her face that's facing away from the key light. And you can see the set up that I've got here. Mikey Light is on a vote of 45 with the shoot through coming in and down. And my feel light is opposite of that on a 45 so I don't have a dimmer for this light. If I did, I could control the power that way. But I can also control the power by just moving it closer or further away. So if I want an even light, if I want to fill those shadows completely, I gotta move it closer If I want a dimmer and I want some more dramatic shadows and I just move it further away. So with just the fill late, this is how it looks in camera and you can see that that's ah, a little bit under exposed compared to the exposure that we're using with with the key light. So if I move that light even further away, um, it should be even just a little bit darker. I want some dramatic shadows in my photo, the shadows or what makes it interesting. So, yeah, I think that looks good there. So that Keely is just gonna fill in those dark shows just a little bit. So I think we have a nice balance between our key light and feel light. And last but not least in our three light portrait lighting set up, we're looking at her hair light. So the primary role of the hair light is to light the back of her hair and separate the model from the background. Now we don't want her to be right underneath the hair light. As you can see that, that doesn't really give a very appealing look. We want the hair light to be just a little bit back. So she's just getting the feather of the light here, but not too far back that it misses her completely. So I got that just clamped onto the ceiling there, and you can tell by the direction that I changed the light, how much it changes the look. So with its set up basically is pointing about straight down here, and she's just getting the top of her head in the beam there. And it's also lighting the background pretty nicely. So let's check the overall power of that light. So with just the hair light, here's how it looks in camera. So when I'm looking at that photo and camera, um, I think that that light is just a little bit too bright on the top here, so I'm gonna try angling and back at her back background in just a little bit and see if that helps. Now, that's much better. Another option. If you're using hot lights and your one of your lights is too bright, I could just use a piece of tissue paper and tape that over the light there, and you can see how that changes the power of the late. Now, if you're using halogen lights, don't do this because you'll light it on fire. But with led is they're pretty cool. It's no problem to tape it to a piece of tissue, paper and island over the light to decrease the power. But just by angling that light back a little bit, I like how it looks in camera, and I think that'll work quite well with our with our three lights set up. Now let's bring it all together. So I've turned all three lights back on their exactly how we left them by going through them one by one. And that's important that you don't just turn all your lights on and try and figure it out with everything on it. Once go through it step by step one by one, set each light individually And then when you go back to the to the overall scene, you know you've already got everything set. Now all I have to worry about is working with my model and shooting a nice portrait. So that's nice. 80. Nice and tall. Look right here. Now that you know how to do a standard three light portrait set up in studio, you can take what you've learned, and you can adapt this lighting set up to almost any scenario. It's very, very adaptable, Um, and you don't have to use just hot lights, either. You can do this with hot shoe strobes or with studio strobes and with a whole host of different light modifiers to get different looks and change how the lighting looks on your model and how it's modified. The important things to remember are just key light, fill light and hair light. And, as always, if you have any questions, please leave a comment in the question in the comments area, and I will do my best to answer them and help you out 4. Clamshell Beauty Lighting: for next studio lighting set up, We're going to do a clamshell portrait so the basics of a clamshell portrait is basically you want it like a clamshell. So you have two lights top and bottom, more or less like a clamshell pointed towards your subject, and you shoot through the space in between. So in this case, my key light, I've got my small soft box set up overhead, and it's unfortunately, I would like it up a little bit higher, but I'm kind of limited by my ceiling height. Here s Oh, that's in really nice and close on top and on bottom I've got a shoot through umbrella. So that is my fill light and then behind my model here overhead, I've got a hair light, so that's just a strobe that's clamped to the ceiling in all three of these lights. I'm using SB 800 hot shoe flashes, and I'm going to trigger them with R P. C. Synch cord. So it's the same method that we use to trigger our hot shoe flash in studio photography one . Now, the P C synch cord is triggering my key light. But both of my, um, my fill light and my hair light are being triggered by an optical slave. So the SP a hundreds have a built in optical slave. So when the key light triggers via the P C synch cord, both of my off camera flashes will also trigger all at the same time simultaneously. So, just like with our classic three light studio portrait, I'm going to get started by setting the power of the key light. So I've got my lens. It's the 18 to 55 I'm zoomed in is tightest possible. My image quality is set to raw. The eso was set down as low as it will go on this camera, it's s a 100. The white balance is set to daylight because amusing hot shoe flashes, they are set to daylight. So I'm gonna use a daylight white balance. And, um, the shutter speed is set to 1 2/100 of a second. So I want to eliminate all the ambient light that's in this room so I can do that by using 1 2/100 of a second shutter speed. So the only question here is what apertura you So I'm gonna start at F eight so the key light overhead is set to quarter power, and it's in really close. So I think that might just be a little bit too bright. But we'll take a couple of photos and then we'll look at the history Graham on the back. So actually, that looks pretty good at 1/4 power. Let's try increasing that just a little bit to 1/2 power and see how it looks. And there you can see we're starting to clip some of the highlights on her nose, which is the closest point to our strobe. So I'd say 1/2 powers just a little bit too strong. Let's back that off to 1/4 power. Okay, Now we're gonna look at the power of our fill light. So that's this shoot through umbrella down here. I've got my, uh, my key light set to 1/4 power. I'm not going to change the settings on my camera. They're staying at F 81 2/100 of a second and I s 0 100 And just to get started, I'm going to set the power of the strobe on my fill light to be one stop lower than the power of the strobe on my key light. So I'm gonna say that toe 1/8. Remember? The key light was 1/4. We're gonna set this toe 1/8 and I just want this to fill in some of the shadows from below . So let's see how that looks. That looks pretty good. Maybe a little bit too dims. Let's try setting the power of that up just a little bit. Okay, so I've increased the power of my feel light by one stop. So now it's at 1/4 power. My key light is also out of quarter power, so they're balanced but amusing, different light modifier. So they change the behavior of the light differently. So check to see how that looks at 1/4 power. So I think that that's just a little bit too bright. I want that effect of the fill light from below to be a little bit more subtle. So I'm just gonna turn this down by another 2/3 of a stop. So it's ah, quarter power less 2/3 or an eighth plus 1/3. Let's let's check to see how that looks in camera and looking on the back of the camera. That looks pretty good. So that's the fill light effect that I'm gonna use. And finally, I'm going to check the intensity of my hair light. So I want the hair light to be just a subtle kiss of late on the back of her head and her shoulders just a separator from the background A little bit. So to start, I've got that set at an eighth of a power. So if you remember, the key light was quarter power or fill. Light was just slightly less than quarter power, and our hair light is at an eighth. No, I think. Now let's take a look and see how that looks in camera. It looks not bad if I think it's a little bit too bright just on the top of her head there , and I'd like that to be a little bit more even behind her. So I think I'm gonna just going to try and angle that flash down a little bit more instead of having it pointed directly at her head. So now my flashes set straight down. Um, I am using a light modifier on that hair light. I'm just using the built in diffuser. So let's see how that changing the position of the flash changes air photo. It's still a little bit too bright on the top of her head. I'm getting some clipped highlights in her hair, so I'm gonna turn the power of that flash down just a little bit. So now I've got my hair lights strobe set to 1/8 of a power less 2/3 or 1/16 plus 1/3. Same thing that looks a bit better So that hair light now is a lot more subtle. Now let's bring everything together. So I've got my key light with my soft box at 1/4 power. I've got my camera set to F 81 2/100 of a second eso 100. I've got my feel light at 1/8 plus 1/3 and I've got my hair light at 1 16 plus 1/3. There we have a finished clamshell beauty portrait. Now, instead of using a feel like we can also do the same thing with a reflector. So I'm gonna take this feel like we're going to use a piece of foam core as a reflector. So if you're using a reflector. You just have your model. Hold it up nice and close to her face. And you can kind of see the clamshell affect you. This is the top of the clamshell with late coming down. This is the bomb of the crime Show the light reflecting back up. So that should give a very natural look. And I'm just shooting right in through the gap there. So you have to use a fairly tight zoom lens. Zoom right in and getting close. Today there's air finished clamshell studio lighting portrait. 5. Rim Lighting: Hello, everyone. Welcome to our third studio lighting set up. I'm using a backlit or room light and also, um, fill light out front so I don't have that same key light that we did with all the other setups. Mikey Light is almost my room lights, and then I'm just using the fill from the front just to fill in some of those deep shadows . This is one of my all time favorite studio lighting setups because it looks great with muscular, buff, athletic people, or it looks fabulous with boudoir photography. Now, unfortunately, I am not a buff, muscular fitness model or boudoir model. But you're stuck with me and I will show you the set up. And at the end, I'll show you some photos in this exact set up that we did do with a fitness model. So let's get started. So, first of all, I've got four lights that I'm going to use in this set up. The main ones that are doing the heavy lifting are these rim lights here. So in this set up, I'm using to 48 inch strips, soft boxes with an egg crate grid, and you don't really need the egg crate grid to get this look. But just in a really, really small area like this, I find it it helps to control the light. So in this set up, I've got a lot a lot of control over my late. Now, if you don't have studio lights and you don't have big soft boxes, you don't want to spend the money on those. Right now, I'm gonna show you just a couple of ways where you can sort of mimic the look of a strip light. So if you're just using hot shoe strobes, you can get these little miniature burned doors online. And if you just mount your hot shoe strobe in there, you can use the barn doors to control the spill from the beam of your strobe. And that way you can narrow that beam down and get a lot more control over where that light's hitting another kind of really fun and cheap option is to just get a cereal box. And this is something that I actually did for years of to mimic the effect of strip lights . So get your hot shoe flash in a cereal box, you cut the side panel off, cut a hole in the other end opposite. And then you can just mount your hot shoe flash right in there and then by using the cereal box that kind of mimics that look of a, uh, big, giant, soft box trip box. Now, obviously, you're not gonna get the same quality of light from a cereal box with a hot shoe flash stuck in it, But you can get some pretty good results with this. And if you want to make it a little bit more fancy than you know, you don't want your clients just to see you know the Cheerios box on your light stand you can paint the inside white and paint the outside black and it looks, you know, pretty respectable in the lighting set of set up that I'm going to use. I've got three Ellen chrome crotches as my main studio lights and then I'm also gonna use one sp 100 hot shoe flash. So my main room lights, as I said, our my big strip soft boxes and those have Ellen Chrome Quadra in there And then for my fill light out front, I've got a beauty dish within Ellen Crume Quadra And behind me here, up on the ceiling, I have mounted just a s p 100 hot shoe flash and that's pointed back at the background. So that's gonna light the background. So now let's go through all our lights one by one, I've got all my video lights and all the other lights in the room turned off. So right now, the only light that you're seeing on me is the modeling lights from my strips off boxes. Now, if you do have access to studio strobes, it is really, really helpful to work with a A set up that has modeling lights in this configuration because looking at the modeling lights can really help for you to visualize the light on your subject. And when you're working with this set up with the strips off boxes, um, the location of your light and the location of your model really has a big difference in small variations can have a big effect. So I'm gonna show you what I mean. So right now I'm standing a boat, right? Even right in the middle of my soft boxes. So they are behind me just a little bit and pointed just slightly forward, but more or less I'm standing right in between them so you can see the shadows on my shirt . Here I have a relatively even shadow right down the front. So if I'm standing perfectly forward, you're seeing the light coming from the shadows. It's picking up all the nice textures and that on my shirt. And you can imagine if I was, you know, really buff fitness model. How great that would look on their muscles or a boudoir model. Um, obviously, how well, that would look as well. So standing right here in the middle, let's take a picture just to see how that turns out. So the only light here is our strip soft boxes, and I'm right in the middle. Now, if you move forward just slightly, I'm gonna move forward about 12 inches. So just one foot and you could see immediately how different the light changes on me. So now I'm more backlit. Andi, even if I angle these forward just is just a little bit, um, two point more to where I'm standing now. Now that I'm or backlit, it's more of a rim weight and the front of me is more my much more shadow. So let's take that photo now if that's the effect that you're going for Ah, backlit Riml, it can be really cool. You can do like an almost silhouette and there's lots of variations that you can play with with this configuration. Now, I'm gonna do the opposite. I'm gonna back up. So I'm gonna stand about a foot behind where I was standing before, And I'm just gonna leave the soft boxes where they are and you could see now I'm almost out of the light. It's almost missing me. So let's take that photo so you can see in that picture I'm out of the light of this photo . I'm losing the dramatic effect. So when you're setting up your your lighting set up, it's important that your at least kind of in between where your soft boxes are or a little bit in front. If you want to do a silhouette look. But when you're standing, when your box soft boxes there in front of you and the light misses you, it doesn't work out quite as well. So back to where I was right in the middle between them and let's ah, let's get these soft boxes dialed in. Excellent. So the first thing I set was the settings on my camera, So I'm using the same settings that we've used all along. My camera is in ESO 100. It's in raw daylight white balance because I'm using studio strobes that are balanced to daylight. Shutter speed is the 2/100 of a second, which is a little bit slower than the Sync speed for a Nikon or for a canon. And the aperture is F eight. So I'm just using that kit lens with F eight aperture. Now, once I've got my camera settings dialed in, then I go to the power settings for my strop's. So all I did was start with a low power setting for my strobes, dialed it up until I got the exposure that I wanted and you can see in the photo there, Um, my shoulders are the closest part of my body to my soft box, so I'm setting the exposure for the light on my shoulders because they're gonna be the brightest part of this picture. OK, now let's look at our fill light, so the fill light. I'm using a beauty dish. And again there's a whole number of different modifiers that you can use for this. So you could use a small soft box. You can use a big soft box. You could use the shoot through umbrella. It all depends on what the overall look it is that you're going for in your photo. So beauty dish gives you a relatively soft light. Soft box will give you a bit more of a directional light if I had room in here Now again, I'm working with my really low, stupid ceiling height. I'd like to have that light a little bit closer and higher up and came down. So the more that your light skims the body of your subject the mawr texture you can pull out in your subject. But in this case, I just want my feel like to just fill in some of the deep, dark shadows. So I've got my field lights set two stops below what my room lights air set at. So if my room lights, for example were set at full power, um, my fill light would be set at 1/2. Power is one stop and when quarter pyre would be two stops below the power level of my my room lights. So let's take a look and see how that looks. I think that looks perfect. So remember my camera settings didn't change is just the power of that fill. Light is set about two stops below the power of the rimless, and finally we have our background light. So I just turned my video lights back on so you can see me. But, um, in this configuration, because using strips off boxes with a grid, um, and because I have my fill light set down low, there's not a lot of light that's gonna be bouncing around in this shot, so there's not enough light that's gonna light my background. It'll just be black behind me unless I assigned a specific light to light the background. So what I've done is I've got just, ah, hot shoe flash. It's one of my Nikon SB hundreds, and it's clamped to the ceiling here up overhead, and it's pointed back towards the background, and I've got this just said in optical slave mode. So when it sees any of these other strobes trigger, it'll trigger simultaneously and light my background and just a quick note I should mention on how I'm actually triggering my studio strobes. So Ellen Chrome has a built in radio trigger system. It's called their sky ports. So I am triggering all my studio strobes via radio triggers. It's a manual trigger. It's not t tail or anything like that. So I still have to set the control of each light individually, manually. And then all the sky port does is makes that light pop. So it doesn't really matter how you trigger your strobes. You can use that PC sync cable that we have you been using all along You can you use optical slave or radio trigger? So just so you know, in this case, I am using a radio trigger. So again, I'm not changing the settings on my camera at all. I'm just gonna change the power of my background, Strobe, as required. I'm just gonna look at the back of the Cameron, see how it looks. So I've got to set to 1/2 power right now because, you know, I am using studio strobes. There are a lot brighter. They have a lot more power than a small hot shoe flash. So I'm going to start 1/2 power and just see how that looks. So let's take that photo. I think that looks just a little bit too bright on the background. I let it wanted to be a little bit more dramatic than that. So I'm gonna turn the power of this down by one stop. So let's bring it down to 1/4. And I'm also gonna zoom the flash head in a little bit. I want it to be a little bit more of a tighter beam behind me, so I'm just zoom that into 70 millimeters. It kind of creates like a natural vignette on your background light. So let's see if we've got that set finally bringing everything all together. I've got all of my lights turned back on. So I've got my room light. I feel like my background light and we'll just take a few photos here in this set up to show you kind of what you're finished. Photo should look like so do my best sort of action sports buffalo stance here. Maybe trying to a couple phone ones, I make no guarantee I was gonna turn out. I've got a 6.5 foot ceiling here. I can't really do a lot in this set up, but I also speaks to you know, the set up that you have. You can if you've got a bigger space. There's so much that you can do with this configuration, so there's a lot of fun that you can have with us. But let's let's just try a few here you're maybe elite, and, as always, if you have any questions, anything at all anything about your camera settings or stroll power triggering your stove's light modifiers. What light modifiers to use for different setups? Where to position your lights, Anything at all that has to do a studio lighting. Don't be afraid to leave a question in the comments section, and I am more than happy to get in there and try and answer your questions and help you out so that you're not struggling with your lighting setups and you can produce the photo that you you can visualize in your mind's eye for your assignment. So don't be afraid to ask questions, and I'm really looking forward to seeing what you guys come up with for your assignments. And as promised, here are a few samples with an actual fitness model, so I've got the exact same lighting set up. This is in the exact same studio space. I think the only difference here is that a used ah small soft box instead of that beauty dish for the fill light. But other than that, you can see the rim lighting to either side is the exact same lighting set up. So here's another example. Same thing with that really interesting room light on both sides and with a brighter background. So I've got a background light here, and, um, in this particular photo, I didn't use a fill light at all. So I just brought those strip lights a little bit closer to the front, um, so that they're not behind her quite as much. And it's enough light that it gives you a kind of a really interesting Ah, look on her face there. Now, obviously, that's not a beauty look, but for something like this, I think it really, really works well. And so just to take that set up out of the studio, um, here's an example of a hockey shoot I did with the same fitness model. Um, here, I've got just a blue gel on my lights and ah, again, exactly the same lighting set up with that strip box on either side and a fill light in front. So hopefully that gives you some different ideas of different ways that you can adapt this lighting set up. And like I said at the beginning, this is one of my all time favorite lighting setups. ITT's really, really versatile, and, ah, there's a lot of fun that you can have with this. So, uh, good luck with it, and I'm looking forward to see what you guys can come up with. 6. Post Processing: Let's do, Ah, quick light room edit of one of our photos. So I decided that I'm gonna do my edit on the clamshell photo because I actually did the most work to this one. The other ones air Pretty straightforward. It's but this one I spent a little bit more time on. So here's ah, one that I edited. And here's Thea. The original photo that came out of camera and I'm actually not really happy with the lighting set up on this one. You can see there's she She's got some glare in her glasses there, and that's from the shoot through umbrella. So if I zoom right in on this, you can see that just a little bit of glare, um, in the glass of her glasses there. And, you know, I think if I had a soft box down below, I probably wouldn't get that. I think it's the umbrella that's causing that because got a curved surface. You can see the catch light there. Um, I think if that was a soft box, I wouldn't get it. So, um, a way instead of doing the one with the glasses on, um, I've already done this one. Um, but let's let's do one without the glasses on. Okay, So to get started, we're in the developed panel, and the first thing I always do is go down here to the lens correction enable the profile correction. I'm also gonna turn on that remove chromatic aberration. I don't think there are any, but it just doesn't hurt. Turn that on anyway, next week and come up and checker overall. White balance. I think that it looks pretty good. Um, there's nothing in there that's really neutral gray. So I'm gonna have to just try the temperature slider there. No, that's too cool. Definitely too warm. So let's leave it back where it was. It was at daylight. It's at 49. 50. I think that looks good. The exposure, um, maybe a little bit more. But, you know, I think that exposure is almost perfect. Gonna add some contrast here. Uh, toe plus 14 15. There on the contrast. The highlights look good. Shadows might come back to that one. Let's go down to blacks. Click that click fault on your keyboard. Brings up the black clipping mask. And bring that down. Just a touch. So I'm at minus nine on the blacks that looks good. And back up here to the shadows. Increase that just a little bit to bring some or life back into the shadows There. Perfect clarity, usually on beauty portrait. So you don't want to touch that. Could bring up the vibrance. Maybe just a little bit, Um, again, on a beauty portrait, you don't wanna make it. Ah, to vibrant. You wanna have natural skin tones, but just a little bit there, So Okay, think that looks good for basic corrections. The crop. You know, I think I actually did a really good job cropping this in camera. So not gonna touch that. Now, let's go in and touch up her eyes. So I'm gonna zoom into 1 to 1 preview there and ah, the first thing I'm gonna do is give her a little bit of, um, detail around the outside of rise. So I'm gonna turn out, make sure all my adjustments are zeroed, and then I'm gonna increase the clarity of her eyelashes. They're kind of like a relatively small size brush just a bit bigger than her eyelashes. And quickly brush that around and I don't want this part down here to be dark. If you hold down the space bar away, have a tool selected, you can move around in your photos. So going to the other I as well. So just brush that extra clarity around her eyelashes. No, I don't want that. Ah, that to be darker up the top and bottom there. So I'm gonna go over and click the erase and then erase that part of the brush there from these spots where I don't want it. Now let's do her Iris is going to select a new brush. I'm going. Teoh, um, bring the exposure down just a little bit and increase the sharpness. So I'm just gonna make a really small brush, and I'm gonna go around the edge of her iris here with that and we'll write. I'm also going to her pupil. So around the edge of the iris and then just right in the middle and make that pupil, um, 100% black and do the same thing on the other side here. So just pulled down the space bar, drag over just around the outside of her iris here on both sides and her pupil here. So doing the same thing that we did on the other. I You want to kind of make sure that you do both eyes the same or otherwise. It kind of looks funny. They're going to the inside. So a new brush again. I'm gonna increase the exposure this time. Just just a little bit. Um, and we're also going to keep that sharpness, actually is. Crank that up a little bit, plus 50 on the sharpness. And now I'm gonna brush this adjustment in between in that spot just between the outside of her iris and the in her pupil. So coming around here now, they don't want to go too heavy with this effect because it tends to give people, um, eyes that look a little bit, uh, supernatural, but just a little bit. Ah. Tends to look quite good. So brush that around the inside of her iris there and back out to our full size preview, so I still got her iris selected there. I'm gonna bring up the exposure on that just a little bit until it starts to look a little bit too weird. So there you can see it's she's got super naturalized. And if we bring that back down just a little bit, I think they're looks good. Now, looking at out here in the 1 to 1 preview, I think I could make the whites of her eyes a little bit brighter as well. So let's go back in there, get another adjustment, brush new brush, bring the exposure up. Plus twenties. Good. Not any sharpening. Gonna bring the temperature down just a little bit because I wanna kind of cool off that redness in her eyes. They're so you know, just just want this to be a subtle just a little teeny bit of, ah, whiteness in the whites of their eyes. So take off a little bit of the red. Just bring it up. Just just a touch. You know, you don't You don't want your adjustments to be too obvious. Just little subtle adjustments work the best and the same thing on the other. Either Brayton, those whites of the eyes just just a little bit. Let's go back out to our full size and I'm gonna increase. I still got that brush selected the whites of rise, so I'm gonna increase the exposure on that. Just a little bit. So if I go make them, like, glowing white, they look silly. Um, but just a little bit. Wait and try and bring that temperature down. Just a touch, too, because they still look kind of red. Okay, Looks good. Next, While I've still got the adjustment brush selected, I'm gonna find the brush. That was the clarity that I added to her eyelashes. So I think it yet. That one there. So I'm gonna do the same thing to her eyebrows. So I'm just adding some clarity to her eyebrows. And Aiken, try to see how this looks on our lips to Sometimes it looks good. Sometimes it doesn't. Ah, um, no, I think that's a little bit too much. So it's hit the erase their and erase that from her lips there. And I think her teeth look pretty good. I'm not gonna bother going in and whitening those. Um, they look fine. So the next step is to look for blemishes, and we're gonna kind of touch her skin up there. So go back into that 1 to 1 preview, select the spot removal tool and just go through. And if there's any you know obvious blemishes. You wanna you wanna touch those up? Because, you know, it's just ah is a one click fix. There's no reason to not get rid of somebody's blemishes. Um, and everybody has them. You know, it doesn't matter how perfect your model Skinner is. There's gonna be some sort of blemishes there, so just go in and kind of scan around, hold down the ah space bar. Well, you move. And, ah, just any any kind of little spots or, you know, dots and blemishes Get rid of those. So that one didn't select a very good area. So you do kind of have to keep an eye on the tool to make sure that selects the right area . So there it sampled this part of her nose over here, which, you know that doesn't work. So go there. Looks good. And up to our foreheads. If there's anything up there, you know, fortunately, you know, this model is fairly clear skin. There's no a lot to do here. No, I could probably leave a lot of these, but it only takes a couple seconds. So why not? We're gonna get to ah, touching upper skin in a minute. But right here, there's kind of this dark, deep crease here on her forehead. So I'm gonna get rid of that as well. So just gonna sample that, Get rid of that Really straightforward, just just with thespian removal brush. So back to our full size. Okay. Next. Um, I think I'm just gonna brighten your eyes. Just a touch. Just a global adjustment. So another spot brush there. Make sure the temperature zero everything else zeroed. Bring up the shadows. Just a little bit. Exposures at plus 20 of a brush. It's about the size of her. I there and just just a little bit of, uh, brush that on. Just I just want to brighten up her eyes. Just a touch. Now we're gonna touch up our skin. So slick that just mean brush again and make sure everything zeroed. Here, bring the clarity down to minus 100. And I'm just gonna brush over very, very rough. Umm kind of the inside areas of her of her skin. Now you don't want to get near anything that has an edge. So, like her eyelashes, I don't want to brush over that her their hairline. There I don't want to brush that, but just kind of, um anything that's Ah, big, large area skin you can brush over with that minus 100 clarity. So there I've brushed over most of her face there, just staying away from the edges And that that minus 100 clarity. Just it kind of just smooth skin out a little bit. So I'm gonna zoom in to my 1 to 1 and aerials, you'll see that effect that the minus 100 clarity gives. So, you know, you can still see the structure in her skin there, but it just kind of blurs it of little bit stay away from the edges of her nose and then go up to her eyes as well. And in here and just gonna be careful that I don't, um, accidentally brush over her eyebrows or eyelashes because I want those toe stay nice and shirt. Try and get a little bit of these wrinkles under here. You know, I don't want to take it all out because you know, you still want the essence of the person that you're photographing. You don't want to smooth this out completely and make her look you know, unrealistic. But just a just a little bit. Is using nice touch to your portrait. So there, I think that's good. Let's go back to her. 1 to 1. Okay. Next I'm gonna work on her hair a little bit. So she has Ah, you know, a red color to her hair here. And I'm gonna accent that by making it a little bit more contrast in a little bit more red . So I'm going to increase the contrast. Not too much, but plus 20. And increased the warmth of her of the her hair as well. So brought the color temperature up and just gonna brush this on. Be careful being careful not to brush it onto her skin. Um, I don't want her to have orange skin, but I think that gives just a little bit of an extra glow to her hair. Um, which is, uh, you know, kind of gives it a nice finishing pop. Now, down here, I want to make sure that I don't accidentally brush on two areas that shouldn't be read. So, um, if you do, you can just select that, erase Tulloch's well and go back and erase the areas that you shouldn't have brushed. But this is just a really easy way to kind of accent your model's hair. And, um, you just brush it on like that. That looks good. Next, I'm gonna do a deal with some of these fly away here hairs here around the outside. So I want to make sure that auto mask is not turned on. Select my adjustment brush. Make sure auto mask is not on zero these out, and, um, select a new brush and bring the exposure way down to minus for now, because I've got a black backdrop. Aiken, do this. If I didn't have a black backdrop, I have to find another way to do this. But in this case is actually really easy. So I'm just gonna brush that on around the outside, being careful not to get too close to her hair there. I don't wanna, you know, define the edge. I just want to kind of get rid of all the those hairs that are sticking out on the outside . Smooth it out a little bit. Kick is good. And I think the last thing I'm going to do here is that a little bit of a Grady in up from the bottom. So bring that up. I want the exposure. No, not that dark. It doesn't look great. Just a little bit minus 0.5. I think that's good. So there you go. There's, Ah, really quick light room Edit of a portrait of beauty portrait with clamshell lighting. So going back to original. That's how it came in camera and are finished edited Beauty, Clamshell portrait. 7. Final Thoughts and Next Steps: that wraps up studio lighting to advanced lighting techniques. I really hope that you guys enjoyed the course. I hope you learn something new about studio lighting, and I hope that I've got you a little bit excited about how to use multiple light sources in studio and all the different variations that you can use with studio lights. So here's the three portrait's that we took in the class or first portrait are classic three Lights Studio Portrait. Here's my finished edited portrait For the second portrait we did our clamshell beauty lighting. And here's the edited version of that photo. So touched this up in light room. And this is how the finished image looks. And finally, for our room lit sports put photo or boudoir photo again. Here's thief finished portrait touched up with light room and the finished picture, so I really hope that you guys are ready to jump right in. Pull out your own gear, set up your own studio lights. And don't forget that the assignment for the class is to produce your own studio lighting portrait. Now it doesn't have to be a head and shoulders portrait. It could be whatever speaks to you in your own photographic style. But the only catch is that you have to use more than one light, so you have to use at least two studio lights so it can be hot shoe strobes, hot lights or studio lights, but as long as you have more than one light, so I really encourage you to get an assignment in. And if you get stuck with anything along the way, if you can't quite figure something out or something's just not quite working out, Um, by all means leave a comment in the comment section for the class, and I am more than happy to help you out, and I know the other classmates as well. We'll jump in with comments if they can help us. Well, so get those assignments in, and I'm looking really looking forward to seeing what you can come up with. And finally, the next class is going to be studio lighting three, where we're going to take our studio strobes and we're gonna move out of the studio, and we're gonna move into a location that has ambient light. So we're gonna learn how to mix our studio strobes with the natural ambient light in the room. Eso I really excited for that one. And I hope you guys are too. And I I just want to really thank everybody for watching chairs. 8. Studio Portrait On White: Hey, guys, I've got a quick bonus lesson for you. So I ended up having to take a headshot portrait on White for a newspaper article. And I thought, you know, Well, I've got everything set up. I might as well take you guys through a quick set up of how to shoot a portrait on White or any studio portrait on white. So the big difference between shooting the studio portrait that we've already covered in the class and shooting something on a white background is that with a white background, you have to be very careful about how you light the background. So I'm just gonna take you through a quick run down, and then I'm gonna show you what each light in this set up does to contribute to the overall finish portrait. So, first of all, I've got my key light, which is a nice big 32 by 48 inch soft box. I'm using Eloquent Ellen Chrome. Cuadrado's as my studio strobes in this set up. But it doesn't really matter what use is your light source. You can use hot shoe flash studio strobes, hot lights if you have them. It doesn't really matter what the light sources. Three important thing is that you pay attention to the light modifiers and sort of the overall configuration. So I've got my key light and then opposite of the key light. I've got just a piece of foam core here as a reflector. So the reflectors gonna fill in some of those shadows from the key light. And then for my backdrop, I've just got a white sheet that's hanging on the door door frame here, so nothing fancy at all for my backdrop, a piece of paper like a paper backdrop works better for photos on white because the paper doesn't have any of these little wrinkles increases in them. So you can see with a piece of fabric. It becomes really obvious when you got a wrinkle or crease in it, and it sometimes you have to do more post to get rid of that. But for something really quick like this, I'm just using this piece of white sheet is just a bedsheet. Nothing fancy so overhead. I've got a 24 by 24 soft box. Now you can see that the soft boxes pointing more or less straight down and it's angled back towards the backdrop. So the purpose of the soft box is mostly toe light the backdrop and where I'm standing for my portrait I'm gonna be standing right here. I'm just gonna be catching the edge of that beam. So I'm feathering the light onto my head most of the lights going on to the backdrop. So it's acting as a hair light for me and also as a backdrop light to light sort of the top half of this backdrop. Now the balance out the light on the backdrop Because I want this whole thing to be a nice even white down below I've got a backdrop light So this is just a bear strobe with reflector on it and thats gonna fill in that weight from the from the bottom So my background lights lighting the bottom part of my white backdrop my overhead soft boxes lighting the top part of the backdrop. Now the power on these two strobes is balanced so that they more or less like this background background to 100% white. So you can check that in your hissed a gram and you have to kind of play with the settings of each strobe just to make sure that you want to get the light on the background is even as possible. And you wanted as close as possible to being 100% white. So when I say that, I mean just lightly clipped at the top end of the history, Graham. So you can check that on the back of your camera. Just take a test shot, check the check the photo on the back of your camera, take a look at the history Graham and see that that white is just clips slightly to 100% white. And I've got my camera set to eso 100 F eight and 1 2/100 of a second. Now, even though I'm standing in a relatively brightly lit room, it's my sun room surrounded by windows. I've got overhead lights on. I've got the key light. You'll see the at F eight s 0 101 2/100 of a second. Even with all that ambient light, I'm relying 100% on the lighting from the strobe. So just the ami in the photo is gonna be almost completely black. Okay, now let's go through and see what each light does individually. So I've got just the overhead strobe here and you'll see that it's gonna like the top half of the background and also a hair light on me. So let's take that photo and see how that looks. Now let's do the same just for the background light. So there's just the background light. Now let's add them together. We've got our overhead soft box background light in hair light and also the background light below. So this is all the back lighting? No. Another tip for shooting on white is you want to make sure that you don't overexpose your background too much. If you make the white beyond 100% white like if you blow blow it out big time, you're gonna lose contrast in your in your photo. So the your subject is gonna kind of look washed out. So you want to just keep it as close toe white as possible? Not over. Not under just kind of right. Bang on. Now let's take a look at our key light. So I'm just setting the power of the key light by looking at the back of the camera again. So I've got all the other lights turned off. The only light I'm gonna look at is the key light here. I want to get a good exposure on the bright side of my face. I'm not worried about the dark side so much right now. I just want to look at the back of the camera. Make sure that kind of my forehead here is probably gonna be the brightest spot. It's the closest to the light, so I want that to be a proper exposure. So let's see how that looks and then adding, in the foam core reflector, you'll see the difference here just fills in the shadows on the dark side and then finally bringing it all together. 9. Post Processing: I've imported my portrait on white into light room. And I'm just gonna show you a couple tricks here in light room because it can be tricky. Did get a good white background. Um, so I'm just gonna show you what I do in light room. So I've imported my photo. The first thing I'm going to do is come down here to enable the lens profile correction and also turn on the remove chromatic aberration check box there because I'm shooting into a bright light background. I don't want any chromatic aberrations, so just check that box. Next. I'm gonna adjust the white balance here. I had my camera set to daylight White balance, but it looks just a little bit cool. Maybe a touch magenta here. So gonna find something on here that's more or less a neutral gray note. A little bit too orangey there. Let's try. Let's try there. Yeah, that looks pretty good. That looks like a more or less a neutral skin tone there for me. Um, so next they're gonna look at my exposure. And if I look at the history Graham here, you can see the exposure is pretty much bang on a you know, having clipped any blacks. It's kind of even across the mid range. And then in the highlights here, if I click on if I turn on the highlight clipping, Um, a mask, you can see only clip. Just a touch of the highlights down here at the bottom. So, you know, we're talking about exposing your background, so it's 100% white, so I kind of miss that, Actually, in the when I took this photo, I should have had the top light just a little bit brighter, um, to clip that background in camera. But that's okay. We can fix that. So moving down, I think the exposure is good where it is contrast. I'm gonna increase the contrast just just a little bit. I'm kind of partial to contrast the photos, so bring that up. Um, highlights know, normally I wouldn't want to have any clipped highlights, so I would bring that down. But in this case, I actually want all the highlights to be clipped. But if I do a global highlight adjustment, it also adjust the highlights on my face which looks a little bit too shiny and breaks. I don't want to do that. It's gonna leave the highlights where they are gonna come down here to the black slider and hit Ault on my keyboard. And that brings up the blacks clipping mask when I click the black slider and bring that down just to I start to clip some of the blacks in the deep shadow areas. So that looks good. And then come up here, bring my shadows up just a little bit. Um, kind of even that. So I think that looks like a pretty good, uh, adjustment there. Now I'm gonna crop. I want to even this Ah, this Ah, composition out a little bit, as as a little bit standing off to the side of too much. So just even the composition out there looks good. Make sure you have enough room above your head. It looks weird if you're if you crop in really tight and your head's tight to the top of the frame, it looks a little weird. You want it have a little bit of space on the top. So can it. Looks good. Supply that crop. Now, the last thing we're gonna do is deal with this background. So you can see if I zoom in here, you can see some of this gray, uh, creases in the background here in the back, in the in the back. Now, I don't want to see that. I want that to be 100% white. So if I there's a number of ways you can do this but kind of the easiest way, the way I like to do it is just to use an adjustment brush, set your exposure up to vote plus two. Or you can even go way up to plus four if you want, Um, and then without using ah, mask, I'm just gonna brush that, um, exposure adjustment around the outside. And you can see that I've got the the white highlight clipping mask applied and you can see everything that's red. It's now clipping to 100% white. And like I said before, normally this is what you don't want to do. But in this case, I do want that backdrop to be pure white. So his brush that around really quick along the edges of my photo. Now, to get in a little bit closer and apply the auto mask, make my brush a bit smaller, come in close and just quickly apply that adjustment brush around the outside and it auto masks against my profile that I've got here. You don't have to be super careful with it because, um I mean, it's close to white anyway. But it's just good to get that background is close to full. White is you can't. So turn that off and there we go. There's are finished edited portrait on White, along with a basic editing profile.