Direction of Light
Lesson 8 from: FAST CLASS: Skin 101: Lighting, Retouching, and Understanding SkinLindsay Adler
Direction of Light
Lesson 8 from: FAST CLASS: Skin 101: Lighting, Retouching, and Understanding SkinLindsay Adler
Lessons
Skin Essentials: White Balance
16:02 2Skin Essentials: Mixed Lighting, Color Contamination
15:42 3Camera Settings: Files
04:53 4Camera Settings: Color Spaces
15:10 5Color Management
11:03 6Exposure
06:21 7Shoot: Quality of Light
08:43 8Direction of Light
02:14Lesson Info
Direction of Light
okay. Direction of light has to do with where the light is placed in relationship to the subject and direction of light is what shapes the face. I usually think of quality light kind of sets the mood defines the overall kind of textures to the skin, where a direction and direction is definitely going to shape the face and it's how you control or create shadows. So again, it comes down to a balance. Flat light, flat light means if I am the camera and you are my subject, it's going to be pretty much centered and above my camera. Like even to you, it's not high, it's not low, it's not left, it's not right. It's flat kind of in between on access with the camera, flat light is much better for not showing texture. Flat light is what helps best if you don't want to see a lot of wrinkles or a lot of blemishes. But flat light does nothing to shape the face. The face is very one dimensional and that tends to be a bad thing. So you're trying again to find the balance. If I bring the light off to ...
hire too far to the side, it's going to create texture. It's going to show me texture. However, if I have it too centered, it's boring and flat. So what are you looking for in your photograph? And I have a couple good examples we can take a look at here to the balance between lighting to flatter the skin, lighting to flatter the bone structure structure and lighting for the mood of the image. These are the main things you're looking at which light looks best on that person's skin, but is that really showing their cheekbones and jawline based on where I put that light? Is that, is that what I want? And if I'm going for dramatic, is that fitting the mood? If I'm going for soft, you're constantly balancing these three things for skin? And that's why I always come back to sometimes the mood I want to achieve. It's not going to be flattering on the skin and I'm going to have to retouch for the mood that I'm looking for. Or other times I want to get it just perfect and flat and glowing in camera. And so I would maybe go flatter.
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