Ringflash and Rimlights...

Tim Kamppinen

I recently built a DIY ringflash and I decided to try it out with the ubiquitous Jill Greenberg/Dave Hill sort of lighting setup with rear rimlights and front fill. I used an sb600 and an sb28 as the rim lights with an sb28 firing into the ringflash for the fill/key (it's sort of both I guess). The post processing is similar for all three but on the second two I went for the smooth shiny look. Let me know what you think:

1. A self portrait:




2. A friend of mine:




3. Another of my friend:

Grly

I really dig the post on these! Care to share your DIY ringflash setup?

Richard

Tim,

I moved your post describing how you built the ringflash to a new thread in the Accessories forum. I thought this was worth sharing beyond the People forum. Hope you don't mind.

Regards,

Tim Kamppinen

Richard wrote:

Tim,

I moved your post describing how you built the ringflash to a new thread in the Accessories forum. I thought this was worth sharing beyond the People forum. Hope you don't mind.

Regards,

No problem. I just added an explanatory note at the top of the new thread so people wouldn't get confused.

John Slone

Tim,

Would love to know more about your B&W conversion on these images. The hands on #2 and #3 are incredible.

Thanks,

John Slone

Tim Kamppinen

John Slone wrote:

Tim,

Would love to know more about your B&W conversion on these images. The hands on #2 and #3 are incredible.

Thanks,

John Slone

Thanks a lot. The B&W was a simple adjustment layer in CS3, but the rest of the post processing I did basically as described in the following link:

http://dustinsnipes.com/blog/index.php/2009/01/tutorial-photoshop-for-70-basketball-portraits-in-in-two-days/

The key to this is all the dodging and burning of the highlights and shadows. Having the proper lighting setup in the original shot is paramount for this to look good. Some changes I made were using more than one high pass layer on different parts of the image with layer masks, at different radii, using hard light as the blending mode any playing with the opacity, etc. To get the smooth look in the second two, I stamped everything to a new layer and applied the noise reduction filter at full strength with 0 sharpening and 0 detail preservation. This applies a slight smoothing blur to everything but retains the signficant details. Then I duplicated this layer and applied a 3 pixel high pass sharpening to make it look a little more crisp. I grouped these two layers and masked them off of the eyes and reduced the opacity wherever I wanted sharper detail, such as the eyebrows, etc. Finally, I thought the skin looked a little too smooth so I stamped everything one more time and applied an add noise filter at about 5 % (or 5 pixels, I can't remember how it works) and monochromatic to simulate a film grain sort of texture. I masked this off of the shirt though because I liked it looking really smooth.

I'm now thinking it's a little overdone with the smoothness so I'll probably do it a little differently next time, but that's basically it. Just play around with it and figure out what works for you.

John Slone

Thanks Tim, some of it is over my head but i appreciate your detail and I am sure it will help me as i improve my post processing skills.

John

Tim Kamppinen

Here's one I did in color. I toned down the smoothing on the skin in this one to retain some texture, and I think it looks better as a result: