Kris D'Amico Photography

January 20th, 2009 by Kris

Often times I get the same question that goes something like this:

Hey dude, I saw this picture that’s really cool and I was wondering how they lit it like that? There’s a bright light on one side that’s kinda’ harsh and then a softer smaller light on the other side. I mean how do you do that?

Ok, so for those who know stop reading now and make a long comment that will share with us how you do it! (Thanks in advance.) For everyone else here we go.

There is a formal name for this lighting technique, but I don’t know it. I call it . . . Side Lighting! As I’m sure you know it’s used to emphasize shape and form, therefore it’s used often times for a character study of an older individuals or simply to add a bit of drama to what other wise would be a flat image.

Here’s a image of the set up that I used this morning:

Side Lighting Set: Click the image for a larger picture.

Let’s go though the components in this setup:

• 1 large soft box camera left that’s attached to an 800Watt Alien Bee and turned up to full power this is my key light
• 1 1600Watt Alien Bee, turned up to full with a 20° Grid Spot attached.
• 2 “flags” of 16×20 pieces of black foamcore
• 1 Black background (28×36 piece of black foamcore)

Now you’ll notice that the softbox is not pointed sideways, but towards the camera, this is because I am controlling the spill of light onto the background and since it is a softened light the angle will help archive a slightly more ascetically pleasing light than 90° off the subject. Also, I could use a bigger background, and bigger flags, but since this was just a headshot I only needed to control a small space behind my model’s head.

Now onto the photo:

Raw Image off camera

As you can see there are a few things we need to do to improve this image. But, as far as how the light fall across his face and shape of the back light on his neck, I am happy with the results. Now enter the digital editing process.

I do 90% of my editing now in Adobe Lightroom, if you don’t have a copy go get one – it’s $299 and it will change your life. Aperature by Apple is very similar in many ways and is a little cheaper ($199), I use Adobe Lightroom, because I use Adobe Photoshop. Not that it makes a difference but I digress.

So, I import the raw files and I open up the picture in Lightroom and head over to the develop tab and start hacking away. The first thing I notice is the histogram is a little lop sided:

See a little shaddow heavy.

This is ok though, because of the effect that we are going for. So here’s my list of actions to this for this image:

1. crop it to a 4×5 ratio, this will be used mainly for a web avatar so just makes it a little more screen friendly.
2. Warmed up the white ballence, a little cold in color tone for my tastes.
3. Raised the Fill Light Slider
4. Raised the Blacks Slider to ballence the image out
5. Increased the Clarity and Vibrance
6. To keep the color from being to “candy” I dropped the saturation

Here’s how my Develop Settings look now:

And the image? Well, greatly improved, I think – so I exported it out of Lightroom so I can do my final edits in Photoshop!

Image Exported out of Lightroom

Now, I am big beliver in do it yourself in Photoshop, I tell people all the time to forget 90% of the filters that Photoshop ships with. But there are a few that are invaluble. I used Nik’s Color Effects Pro softwear to create a color gradient across his face. (Now this same effect can be done without this plug in by making a two color gradient and messing with the Blending Options and Layer Transparency, but I’ll save that for another time.)

Here’s my settings in Nik:

Now, Nik makes a seperate layer and I just turned this layer off for the time being. The next step was to replace some of that noise that was created with the fill light slider with “film grain.” Now there are two types of film grain that photoshop offers, ALWAYS use the one named “FILM GRAIN,” located here on the menus:

I used these settings for this picture, just use your judgement here – this tool has a lot of power over contrast and image structure.

Then I do something that I don’t know many other people use, the “fade” menu item.

Now, to use this after you ok the filter you cannot do anything else, you have to do this immediately. Anyway, I backed the film grain filter back to 50% and hit ok. Then, turned that layer that Nik generated for me back on, set it to 50% and then chose the blending option as “Color.” And this is what we came up with:

Image after Film Grain and Bi-Color Filter in Photoshop

So, I know there’s plethora of information here, most in post. But you will notice that without the right shape of light, we could have never achived this look. Try it out and get back to me with your pictures!!

Now go shoot!!