Lighting - lowkey - 1 photo tutorial

[r_fredrick_smith]

Here is another of my fast one photo tutorials. This one is for a simple lowkey shot:

Notice, that there is just one large softbox, and the light is blocked from hitting the background by the gobo (reflector shown).

Shot with Canon 20D and the Sigma 18-125 F3.5-5.6 (shot at f11).

This lowkey shot also illustrates the use of black on black. Black disappears against black (an old magic illusion). But for the blacks that you want fully visible, be sure to expose well to get detail (see the gloves).

Cheers,
rfs

[r_fredrick_smith]

Here is another shot with the same lighting and in the same series. Again working with black on black and holding good detail in black (as in the bodice).

Cheers,
rfs

[Jim Peters]

Single Light low Key Is An old Favorite Of Mine!Allows You More time To Communicate With The Subject.
Kudos!
Jim P

[RSStory]

The balack on black can be tricky for some. But I have found people seem to have a more difficult time with a high key white on white.

I prefer the 2nd shot you posted. First looks a little blown out to me on the arm. Second one I really like. Nice job

[Arbib]

Ahhhh A GOBO to block the light from hitting the BG...

I'll have to start using one. I used "Curves" in my Software, to pull in the almost black, that needed to be black..It was the light that caused it..Just didn't put it together....GOBO

[r_fredrick_smith]

If you shoot RAW, then you can pull the background to black with the shadows slider of the RAW converter (when setting the black point). You can tweak it with the curves tool in RAW, which gives even more control that later in PS.

But yes, a GOBO (or sometimes called a "Go Between") is quite useful. They come under lots of different names (a GOBO in the movies is quite different than what I'm calling a GOBO).

Cheers,
rfs

[BlueCrow]

Originally Posted by r_fredrick_smith

If you shoot RAW, then you can pull the background to black with the shadows slider of the RAW converter (when setting the black point). You can tweak it with the curves tool in RAW, which gives even more control that later in PS.


Cheers,
rfs

Could you post an example of this?

[r_fredrick_smith]

Originally Posted by BlueCrow

Could you post an example of this?

Here is a fast two part example of one approach in RAW. Here is screen shot 1 of the photo in RAW to start with



Notice how bright the black is. I didn't have the GOBO properly positioned at this point the shield the background. I've done nothing with the black slider at this point. Now I'm going to push the background to black with the black slider:



So I can stop there, and then deal with the loss of detail in the blacks of the dress in PS. Or I can do what I normally do (because its faster). I go and open the above shot into PS.

Now I go back to RAW, load the same image and push the black slider back to the left and bring back all the shadow detail in the dress. I then load this second image into PS. Here is what I see:



I now drag the lighter image on top of the first image (while holding down the shift key). This means they perfectly align. I then click on the Add Mask Icon on the Layers Palette while holding down the Alt key to put a black mask over the layer and make it a layer mask. So now I see the original photo with dress to black. I now use a soft white brush to paint back the dress details I want to get to here:



And here is the final image.



And then a small tweak to the softness gives:



This is not an ideal example, because I had way too light a background to start with, but it works well as an exaggerated example. Often you need do nothing more than adjust the black slider but since I had to push it pretty far to get rid of the light, I then used the combining of two RAW images trick and the black mask. Keep in mind that white reveals and black conceals when using the black mask techniques.

Even though it takes some time to explain, I can do the whole process above in about 1 minute.

This black layer mask and soft white brush thing is a very powerful tool in Photoshop. A vast number of things can be done with it for everything from selective focus work, background and foreground adjustments, dodging and burning (you never want to use the standard dodge and burn tools), adding powder to the skin, and so forth. I've doen several articles on G1 on the Black Mask thing, so you can check there for more details.

Last note: I didn't do any sharpening in this workflow. Normally, I would have done some selective sharpening of the eyes, beads, etc. --- so keep that in mind.

Cheers,
rfs

[RSStory]

For those that dont use Adobe Camera RAW. (if you use capture one, bibble or whatever) You can do the same thing there, just process the RAW file both ways and then open them up in photoshop and follow the rest of RFS's tutorial.

[F Stop Fitzgerald]

Originally Posted by r_fredrick_smith

Here is a fast two part example of one approach in RAW.

Thanks for the great little tutorial!

Skip