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Exposure

Lesson 6 from: FAST CLASS: Skin 101: Lighting, Retouching, and Understanding Skin

Lindsay Adler

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Lesson Info

6. Exposure

Lesson Info

Exposure

we are going to start right now with real quick just taking a couple shots with the phase. You guys can take a look at that file quality if you've never seen it before. Um By the way digital transitions are the people that lend me the phase for this. So thank you to them. So could I have like gorgeous model out here? John was your standing? He was pretty good but not quite the same. Thank you. Make sure not tangled. All right. Let's do this quick test. Want to grab a quick test here. Sure everything's looking good. This one's giving my focus speaking. So can you see that green? That green is giving me an idea of what is in focus. So I have her cheek and her iron focus, which is exactly what I want. And then also I have kind of like on an iphone kind of a pinch for looking up close. I can really check the quality. Takes a second to load. But it's really nice because it's the actual pixels. Not just zooming in on a jpeg preview like you have in the back of your camera. So it's pretty awe...

some. All right. I'm gonna get in really, really close so we can take a yeah shooting with a macro lens here. You're like fun violence. Mm All right. Right. Yeah. Okay. I'm gonna take one more regular photo but can we do you mind zooming in on the eyelashes for a second? Right? Yeah. Just hold you can hold it in. Oh, so that's pretty like intense and amazing. Anyway, so if you're shooting like a campaign for beauty and you want all that skin texture, I find it actually easier to retouch one of these files because I have more of that skin texture to work with. Sometimes when I'm shooting with a 35 millimeter camera and I shoot at slightly narrowed up the field. Not much is in focus. So the whole picture looks a little soft and when I start retouching it loses detail, I have details. So this looks tack sharp even after every touch. We're gonna talk about frequency separation when you do frequency separation for these files, it's mind blowing. And that's what they do for avon campaigns. Maybelline is there gonna be shooting one of these? So if you have your exposure wrong dark skin um is going to have no detail. It's just going to show up completely dark if you're under exposed. Whereas um also if you're underexposed, you tend to see more detail that you didn't want to see. Often we'll see that. All right, so let's talk about metering. So in a basic photography classes, beginning photography class, you probably heard what your camera tries to do tries to make everything middle gray. Which is why way back when if you took a picture of I did this with film, you take a picture of a field covered in snow with trees and snow. It was really great. Does it read all that white and said, okay way too much weight, let's under expose it. And then if you took a picture of something that was dark, black on black on black and go, whoa, way too dark and then it would overexpose. It's trying to put everything in the middle, thankfully our cameras have gotten smarter, especially with digital cameras. Um One of the metering modes actually has something in it where it compares the scene to like a million other scenes that it has programs in and kind of guesses what you're probably trying to expose for. So it has gotten better, not great but better and when it comes down to is you need to be smarter than your camera um and you need to know how to outsmart it. All right, So it goes centre weighted spot part partial and evaluative or matrix. What does that mean? Okay, centre weighted. If you see this symbol, it looks at the entire scene, it gives um it gives an exposure based on the whole scene, but then just a little heavier bias on the center, which gives you something that's going to be within the realm of what you want meaning. Like it's not going to be massively overexposed and not going to be massively underexposed, but it probably won't be just right, but it's looking at the whole scene and saying, okay, what's close, This is probably what you would see for what we're looking at when things that are white look a little bit more gray and things that are dark that look a little bit brighter. Um I don't usually use center weighted, then you have a spot. So spot metering takes a tiny little portion of your sensor and wherever you put that it is metering specifically for that exact spot, But it is tiny. It is just 2-4% of your entire sensor. Very, very small. But that's great. If you want to see how bright that highlight is on the forehead or you know when your spot metering that person in your frame, you want their face to be perfectly exposed. So you put it just on their cheek to base your exposure. You're judging the shadows, spot metering when using it, not for making decisions in manual can go wrong kind of quickly. Um That's what I found. So if I am shooting in manual, I use that more to take a reading. Okay, what's the exposure on his shirt versus his face? I can kind of judge the exposure difference. So that's my little in camera meter Partial makes it a little bit easier. It's like spot, but it's a bigger sampling. So it's not the 2% which can make a huge difference if I were here or here make a massive difference in exposure where I'm reading. Um and then evaluative is what most cameras are set on including point and shoots. Um They have a system like this. So what it does, it looks at the entire frame, It tries to guess for you based on all the different has comparisons of other scenes you might be photographing and it puts a little bit more weight on whatever your focus point is. So it's obviously the smartest because if I'm putting my focus point on this person, I probably want them to be correctly exposed. So it puts more weight on where your focus point is. But then it does look at the entire scene. So knowing this, let's just take a look again. This is what it's doing center weighted. It's looking at the whole thing a little heavier in the center, spot, partial and evaluative. It's looking at the whole thing, but then the spot has more weight.

Class Materials

Bonus Materials with Purchase

Makeup Contour Reference
Retouching Checklist
Frequency Separation
Retouching Files
Keynote 1
Keynote 2
Gear Guide

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