Outdoor lighting help?

kdspencer

So I'm working on my off camera flash. For this senior shoot, I shot through an umbrella, slightly underexposed the background, and changed the flash exposure compensation to taste, depending on how I felt she needed to be lit. I also used a blue gel on the flash (although the photos still feel kinda cool to me). All of these were taken in FULL shade.

I have a couple more outdoor shoots coming up next week. What can I do to get more 'pop' to the photo when I'm shooting in shade, or are these good?

1.


2.


3.


4.


5.


Thanks!
Kathleen

marikris

See if you can white balance it better.
Are you using Photoshop CS? If it still looks blue, you can go to CURVES and
pull the blue curve down. Then tweak it on color balance. I hope you don't mind,
I fiddled with your last pic (which looks the bluest to my uncal monitor) using the
above with a little bit of brightening and contrast. It was a quick thing and she
looks a little yellow, but you get the picture (hehe pun intended).

JohnBiggs

Get a grey card and have them hold that when you start to set your WB.

RicherSea

Personally think 4 is the best lit, having the biggest difference between background and subject. It could maybe stand a little bit more, so you might try under exposing the background another 1/2 - 1 stop. I might also be inclined to try a very slightly harder light, subject dependant, so maybe using a silver bounce umberella. That might also help you match the colour temperature of the deep shade as well, since most shoot though umberellas have a very slight warming effect.

Halite

My quick and dirty definition of "Pop" in an image: Contrast between subject and background in one or all of luminance, color and detail.

As for luminance "pop", the lighting is pretty flat in these images. Not bad, just not compelling. #4 has some nice light coming in from the right, providing some modelling on her face and highlights on her face and arm. The others could use a bit more luminance contrast. So more flash versus ambient. And keep the flash off the camera axis to provide some shadows to accentuate the contours of her face a bit. How much more flash and how far off-axis is up to you.

As for color "pop", I'm curious why you used a blue gel on the flash. I wouldn't expect that approach to produce the most flattering color for skin tones, since we generally respond better to warmer flesh tones in portraits. It also wouldn't necessarily match the light in these settings. With all the green grass and leaves around, a lot of the light reflected on your subject is going to be very green, which is also not terribly flattering.

Have you considered using a warm gel color on your flash to enhance your subject's skin tones and also provide some color contrast between your subject and the background? Warm subject versus cool background means subject pops while background recedes.

Finally, detail "pop". Most of these images use selective depth of focus well to keep the eye from straying from subject to background. #4 could use more blur to de-emphasize some of the distracting branches in the woods behind her.

kdspencer

Thanks everyone for your advice.

Marikris, the changes you made to the photo make it look better - you're right, still not perfect, but I could fiddle with it to change it.

John, I'm kicking myself for not taking the grey card out with me. It would have made things a whole lot easier!

RicherSea, I'll try underexposing the background a little more when I play around next. The trick is finding the right balance between ambient light, and flash light so it doesn't look 'flashed.'

Halite, you have a few good points, which leads to another question about gelling the flash:

I used a blue gel because jeffreaux has talked about using CTB gel in the shade, which matches the flash color to the blue hue of the shade, and 'warming up' the photo in post. I was trying to copy some of what I've seen with the warmer photos he gets. But maybe I'm doing this wrong?

I see in a post by diva that she's having similar issues with the subject looking too blue. I was shooting in deep shade, it definitely wasn't open shade... does this make a difference? And when you (Halite) say to use an orange gel as opposed to a blue one, won't that make a dramatic difference between the subject and the background that will look unnatural, or will it look okay?

When should I use my blue gels and when do I use the orange ones? Help please.... anyone!?!?

~Kathleen

divamum

Yup, you're right KD - I had similar problems, and I used CTO gel rather than blue. My understanding was that I was trying to match the warm colour of the actual 6pm light, but .... it didn't work! I too was shooting in full shade for much of the time, and even when there was light on her it was backlighting that didn't touch her face - hence why I reckoned I was supposed to be trying to "match" it with the flash. ::head spinning:: I think I need to get a grey or white balancing card for the future.....

I wish Jeffreaux was around to enlighten us all further, since he seems to have this particular technique down pat.

WB issues aside, I think your shots look terrific - you're always so good with poses!

Halite

kdspencer wrote:

... leads to another question about gelling the flash:

I used a blue gel because jeffreaux has talked about using CTB gel in the shade, which matches the flash color to the blue hue of the shade, and 'warming up' the photo in post. I was trying to copy some of what I've seen with the warmer photos he gets. But maybe I'm doing this wrong?

I see in a post by diva that she's having similar issues with the subject looking too blue. I was shooting in deep shade, it definitely wasn't open shade... does this make a difference? And when you (Halite) say to use an orange gel as opposed to a blue one, won't that make a dramatic difference between the subject and the background that will look unnatural, or will it look okay?

When should I use my blue gels and when do I use the orange ones? Help please.... anyone!?!?

~Kathleen

These are great questions. The color of gel you use depends, of course, on your intended result.

If you're trying to color balance the flash to the ambient light, then you want to find a gel that most closely matches the temperature of the ambient light. In certain shade, this could be fairly blue, since shade tends to filter the warm color of more direct sunlight and leave the bluish tones radiating from the blue sky. In your image in this post, the shade is so deep under the green trees that the ambient light is more green than blue. By using a blue gel, it appears you've corrected your subject's lighting to a cooler color temp than the ambient light, which makes her flesh tones seem colder and more lifeless than desirable. Wouldn't it be great if our cameras had a color sensor that told our flashes to alter their light to match the measured ambient? No more fiddling with gels. We should all write to Canon and Nikon to get working on that. In the meantime, we have to look carefully at the light in each setting and come up with the gel combinations that work best in each case. You probably don't need a perfect match, especially if you're willing to do some selective color correction in post-production.

My suggestion to use a warmer colored filter to add contrast between the lighting on the subject and the background involves a stylistic choice based on the way we see and our general preferences for human flesh tones. As I asserted before, we see warm colors as projecting forward and cool colors as receding in an image. So if you want your subject to "pop" forward, you can take advantage of this effect by warming your subject versus the background color. In addition, we tend to respond more favorably to warmer skin tones than to paler tones, since generally we associate the former with health and the latter with death. This isn't a hard rule. Pale skin can be quite beautiful. But one example of how the bias is used is in the depiction of vampires--most have very pale, almost blue skin tones.

As to whether using a warm color filter on your light will appear unnatural, it's a matter of degree and of taste. Kind of like makeup. Is makeup natural? No, but the right amount can be quite flattering. Too much heavy blue eye shadow on the other hand... So if you're careful with the amount of warming you use, the flash can appear like ray of warm sunlight on your subject filtering through the trees to highlight your subject. Or you can go heavy with it and make a stronger stylistic statement. In some of my portraits (if interested, you can see some examples in my portraits and headshots gallery by following the link in my message footer below), I've pushed the color contrast hard--some love it, some don't What you do in your work is up to you and what you think your clients want.

The main thing is keep asking the questions, keep exploring, and above all keep seeing the light!

divamum

Great post, Halite - thanks for all of that, which helps many of us! However, riddle me this: in this thread I posted shots in similar conditions using an ORANGE gel on the flash... and have had exactly the same problems. What'd KD and I do wrong (or how can we fix it for next time)? I'm struggling to balance mine in a way which emphasises the pretty light which was available (6pm on a beautiful September day) without turning the subject unfortunate shades of bilious green or alien orange.

divamum

Sorry... will go back and correct - I didn't use a filter, but an orange GEL, ie just the flash. Similar result, I suppose, except more localized - which is why I assumed that KD and I both had the same problem (our flash light doesn't match the colour of the ambient somehow?) Sorry for confusion (and KD, I'm hoping since you reference my thread it's not too presumptuous for me to mention it as well - we're dealing with the same frustration, I think, if for slightly different reasons!)

marikris

Would a skylight filter help you guys in this situation? I haven't tested mine yet since it just arrived, but I have a Hoya and I wonder if that would take away some of the color cast from the grass and the trees and let you just focus on getting your flash color correct.

Halite

divamum wrote:

Great post, Halite - thanks for all of that, which helps many of us! However, riddle me this: in this thread I posted shots in similar conditions using an ORANGE gel on the flash... and have had exactly the same problems. What'd KD and I do wrong (or how can we fix it for next time)? I'm struggling to balance mine in a way which emphasises the pretty light which was available (6pm on a beautiful September day) without turning the subject unfortunate shades of bilious green or alien orange.

"Riddle me this..." is a funny, apt expression of the frustration we all have felt trying to craft images using artificial light. This is one place where we try to mix science and art to create great images. Our eyes are not easily fooled, picking up on astonishingly subtle discrepancies between natural and artificial.

Your conditions really weren't all that similar to KD's. Yours were generally out in the open with fading evening light. KD's were in deep green leafy shade. In one of the posts where Jeffreaux discussed using ctb gels in one instance and cto gels in another (http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=134147&page=3) the light was yet again different. There's no one formula that's going to work in all these situations. We really have to look at the quality of light we're trying to emulate or enhance--not just its color temperature, but also its direction and softness. If we get any of these wrong, our eyes will tell us so.

I don't think you were really all that far off with the images in your thread. The first image is best (even though its soft) in terms of lighting. Color and direction are credible enhancements to the existing sunlight. #2 is fine, except maybe you overcompensated to eliminate an orange bias and ended up very blue and cold for her fleshtones. You can set a base level of skin tones for her by doing some eyedropper samples of her skin in an image in which you consider the lighting neutral. This doesn't mean every image should match this color balance, but it will help you to know how the tones are diverging in a given image and where you might go to get back to a more natural balance. #3 doesn't work mostly because the lighting is coming from an artificial direction. That is, everywhere else in the image the light is coming from behind, but then on her face the light is coming almost fully from the opposite direction. It's also a bit orange. In this case, the light is probably best matched by a more yellow gel, like a straw. #4 is nice, but even if you're using the sun for the rimlight on the hair, you don't have to have her back entirely to the sun. She can turn just a bit to let a little sun spill onto her face, or at least appear that way by inserting a little flash from the side she's facing.

To sum up, unless we want our artificial light to call attention to itself, it has to mimic the quality of light our eyes have come to expect over a lifetime of training. Keep looking at lighting and its effect on skin tones in a bunch of situations. And then think about how a flash could simulate that light. Get a few more gels in the warm, and possibly cool ranges, and swap them onto your flash in various scenarios and at various flash power settings to get an idea how they perform. Eventually you're going to just see that light and know that its going to be matched pretty darn well with a combination of 1/2 cto and straw, or whatever.

Scott_Quier

As we all know, we gel the flash to match the color temperature of the ambient light. But, what is often overlooked is the definition of "ambient light".

Consider the following scenario:

• It's 6:30PM in the middle of September - so about an hour before sunset
• Our subject is a young lady with nice, soft skin - light in color
• Our young lady is in the shade of a tree, with the low-on-the-horizon sun striking her from behind, providing a beautiful glow to her hair
• Obviously, our beautiful model is back-lit so we must provide some fill. We opt to use some off-camera strobe for the fill

Now, we know that the strobe is color balanced (more or less) to match "normal" daylight. This normal daylight has got to more blue than the light we are getting from the sun at this time of day so we should be gelling our flash with OTC or OTS - right?

But, a question .... what is the color of the ambient light that is illuminating that aspect of our young lady that the camera sees? Is it orange? Or is it more blue? I would bet that if the photographer were to stand in the position of the model and look in the direction the model is facing, they would see nothing but deep blue colors - that's the color of the light to which the the flash needs to be balanced.

So, we gel the flash with a blue(ish) gel. Take the shot. Then,in post, we "normalize" the colors (set our CWB for the shot) - what's going to happen to the color of the sunlight striking our model from behind? It's going to be warmed just a touch - not a bad thing to have happen at sunset, is it?

divamum

What great responses, Halite and Scott - thanks! I did some trawling in the archive today and found some extended discussion of gelling, and now understand that I got my colours exactly backwards - whoops... :hide KDS, on the other hand WAS gelling blue but... did you use an AWB? In that link Halite provides, I see that Jeff was using ctb AND CLOUDY WB. So there was more than just the gel involved.

You know, just when I think I'm getting the hang of all of this, I realise I've barely scratched the surface. That's what I LIKE about it (always up for a challenge) but geez - them goalposts keep moving!

KDS, thanks for posting your questions and shots - I hope the discussion has clarified things for you, but I can state with absolute certainy it's sure helped me out!!

kdspencer

Wow, I'm learning so much through this thread. Diva - you and I had different situations, but we had the same problem in terms of gelling flashes and trying to figure out which color to use. I'm glad we had the problem at the same time, so we can all discuss.

So to sum it up, it sounds like I gelled the flash correctly, but didn't have my white balance correct (and there might have been some green tones too). I'll go back and play with that in photoshop to get it correct. I do feel vindicated that I gelled it right... WOOHOO!!! :ivar (I was starting to think I had it all wrong)

And Diva, I guess you'll have to go back with your daughter and gel the flash a blue, and see how it turns out. I'm looking forward to an updated post with your new colors. Now I can see why she looked so blue while the background looked okay.

Thanks for the links to other threads... I'll take time to look at them more thoroughly when I get a chance.

~Kathleen

Scott_Quier

kdspencer wrote:

So to sum it up, it sounds like I gelled the flash correctly, but didn't have my white balance correct (and there might have been some green tones too). I'll go back and play with that in photoshop to get it correct. I do feel vindicated that I gelled it right... WOOHOO!!! :ivar (I was starting to think I had it all wrong)

If you're shooting RAW, it doesn't matter to what you have your white balance set - you're going to adjust it in post anyway. What you want to do is shoot a neutral target as your first AND last frame of a shoot under a particular lighting setup. I've found this product and this product to perform quite nicely.

The only advantage I can see (and I might be missing something) of setting the WB to something other than AWB is that is might provide a decent looking image on the LCD on the back of the camera - that can be important for the clients to see.

divamum

Scott_Quier wrote:

If you're shooting RAW, it doesn't matter to what you have your white balance set - you're going to adjust it in post anyway. What you want to do is shoot a neutral target as your first AND last frame of a shoot under a particular lighting setup. I've found this product and this product to perform quite nicely.

The only advantage I can see (and I might be missing something) of setting the WB to something other than AWB is that is might provide a decent looking image on the LCD on the back of the camera - that can be important for the clients to see.

I was quoting a couple of Jeffreaux's posts (I went back and did some archive trawling to see what I could find, plus I think it's mentioned in the one that Halite linked too), where he mentions in shade he typically uses CTB with a cloudy white balance to give him neutral foreground + slightly warmed background. I suspect this is his method/taste rather than a hard and fast rule, but fwiw.....

The thing I have REALLY learned in all this is... I need a white balance card of some kind!

jeffreaux2

kdspencer wrote:

So I'm working on my off camera flash. For this senior shoot, I shot through an umbrella, slightly underexposed the background, and changed the flash exposure compensation to taste, depending on how I felt she needed to be lit. I also used a blue gel on the flash (although the photos still feel kinda cool to me). All of these were taken in FULL shade.

I have a couple more outdoor shoots coming up next week. What can I do to get more 'pop' to the photo when I'm shooting in shade, or are these good?








Thanks!
Kathleen

Im seeing this thread for the first time....sorry Im late to the party.

Overall, I think your color BALANCE between the ambient and flash looks good. The white balance is another issue. Overall, I think these could simply be too cool. Add some more warmth, and up the contrast a bit and I think you will be pleased.

Ive outlined the methids I use in the following thread this week.
http://dgrin.com/showthread.php?t=155709

You are on the right track though!


and I left the above image in the quotes as I felt it was pretty close....as far as white balance goes....to being where Id want to take it. Maybe a little warmer though!

...and remember.....much of this entire discussion is subjective and will vary from person to person based on personal tastes.

jeffreaux2

Scott_Quier wrote:

If you're shooting RAW, it doesn't matter to what you have your white balance set - you're going to adjust it in post anyway. What you want to do is shoot a neutral target as your first AND last frame of a shoot under a particular lighting setup. I've found this product and this product to perform quite nicely.

The only advantage I can see (and I might be missing something) of setting the WB to something other than AWB is that is might provide a decent looking image on the LCD on the back of the camera - that can be important for the clients to see.

Actually....It DOES matter what white balance you use IF you want to be as close SOOC to what you want as a finished image. The two choices to avoid are "FLASH" and "AWB" white balance settings. With AWB, the camera will try to balance for ambient plus the flash which it knows only to be 5500K......if you alter the 5500K with a gel the camera cant possibly know that and cannot correct for it. Using "FLASH" for white balance will cause similar issues(if trying to balance with ambient and using a gel).

The "cloudy" setting gets me extremely close to where I want the WB in post when using a blue (CTB) gel on the flash...when shooting in shade.

I don't use targets outdoors...but do use them if I shoot a custom white balance indoors. I trust my eyes...and calibrated monitor to set WB to tastes in post. Again though, the "cloudy" setting is usually VERY close to where I want to be with the final edit.

There are times and places for AWB.....but Im of the opinion that outdoors in shade with a CTB gel on the flash isnt one of them. YMMV:D