Camera Settings: Files
Lesson 3 from: FAST CLASS: Skin 101: Lighting, Retouching, and Understanding SkinLindsay Adler
Camera Settings: Files
Lesson 3 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
Camera Settings: Files
So obviously the best skin is achieved when the tone is right and the color is right. So lots of different questions. And this is a preliminary slide. We are going to keep diving in deeper and deeper and deeper into this. But first and foremost, most if you want the best skin quality, you need to be shooting raw and I'll tell you about that in a little bit. If you also want the best tones and color to your skin, you need to be working With your file in 16 bit and you need to be working with one of the larger color spaces. Either adobe, RGB 1998 or pro photo, we're going to talk about what that means and why you as a photographer might choose one over the other. But if you just didn't want to watch the rest of this, just know that you need to shoot in raw, need to be working in 16 bit and a larger color space. You never want to be working with S. RGB, here's why you do want to be shooting raw or one of the reasons. First of all, it's just more information when it comes down to skin. The...
more information the better because a lot of our cameras have certain limitations and how already is perceiving skin. And so we want to give ourselves as much information to work with. Um First of all, it has better total range when working with raw. So for example, this even comes down to photographing somebody with really oily skin. If you're photographing a J. Peg and that highlight goes over exposed, you can't get it back. But if you're shooting with raw you can recover that highlight and then work with it in post processing. It also comes down to how skin is represented. Have you ever seen, I don't know if you guys ever seen this, but you look in an area of a kind of a sharper shadow gradient where the colours are all messed up there like green or a little bit yellow and you actually see kind of weird color patterns that has to do with color and tonal restrictions or limitations of that file. If you're shooting in jpeg that is compounded 100 times, you just simply don't have enough information to work with. Um it gives you a lot of flexibility and really a huge one, a huge benefit of shooting raw is you have more leeway to fix incorrect settings if your white balance was wrong. Really hard to fix if you shot jpeg if you're under or overexposed. When you go to correct that with a J. Peg, your picks will start to fall apart and it's very very visible in the skin. Alright, so here's an example of just a really basic example of how skin tones are affected when shooting raw versus jpeg. So in the picture on the left this is my friend eric took this picture of me Um he shot raw plus Jpeg with his d. and the white balance was auto white balance and it was all messed up and it was way under exposed. So when we go ahead and try to fix this, I used all the abilities I had to try to get the color right and I could actually color correct the raw pretty easily and I could lighten it up, I couldn't no matter where I pushed and pulled it couldn't quite get it right with the J. Peg and you can see all of that degraded color and all that picks realization in the shadows. There's blotchy nous of greens and reds and it's fallen apart because I couldn't dive into the colors or dive into the shadows when I was trying to fix it. Okay so this is what it looks like 16 bit versus eight bit. If I am showing an image in black and white And I'm shooting an eight bit, I only have 256 different tones of gray to make up that image, that's actually extremely minimal, especially if you have gradients from highlight to shadow that are really smooth. You will start seeing jumps because you literally don't have enough shades to work with to show that whole gradient. And so you start having steps that starts jumping up there that also applies to the same thing with color you need when you have all this color you actually need all of these different shades of grey to give you all of the different hues of the colors When you're working with eight bit and you're trying to do maybe that gradient in a blue sky that goes from dark blue to light blue an eight bit, there's not enough tonal information. There's not enough range from white to black or light to dark to give you smooth throughout the blues and it starts jumping in banding. So really what you just need to know is there's just not enough information either in the colour or in the different ranges of gradients from light to dark. Just not enough there to work with.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
Student Work
Related Classes
Portrait Photography