Skin Challenges: Multiple Skin Tones Outside
Lesson 12 from: FAST CLASS: Skin 101: Lighting, Retouching, and Understanding SkinLindsay Adler
Skin Challenges: Multiple Skin Tones Outside
Lesson 12 from: FAST CLASS: Skin 101: Lighting, Retouching, and Understanding SkinLindsay Adler
Lesson Info
12. Skin Challenges: Multiple Skin Tones Outside
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
Skin Challenges: Multiple Skin Tones Outside
this one we didn't touch on, but it's kind of combining everything we were talking about taking a wedding dress outside. So if you're going to think that you can get dark person with dark skin in a wedding dress in bright sunlight ever to look perfectly balanced. That's going to be a huge challenge. You really got to try to get uh, get them out of the sun, try to get them in the shade, um, coverage shades, something like that. You could use everything we talked about in the studio, but it's going to be harder. So let's take a look at a couple of things. This is uh, getting both the exposure on her face correct and the wedding dress without overexposing in camera instead of having to do it in post. So the challenges you have with dark skin in a wedding dress outside challenge number one is, there's just too much exposure range, The dress is going to be too bright, the face is going to be too dark, you kind of got to pick one or the other. It's also difficult when you're trying to figure...
this out, if the background becomes another element you're trying to balance with, like if there's a bright background or really dark background. So what we gotta do is a couple of things you want. Diffused ambient light, sun is just, it's gonna make it near to impossible to really control. You can do it, but you've got to think about all those things, you got to think about the high speed sync and then you got to think about just lighting on her face and not the whole dress. So you're kind of combining everything. We talked about the Laird light like we did in the studio. You could do outside and the high speed sync to darken down the background. So you kind of have all these elements. So it's just easier to get the person in the shade or diffused light. Um If you have a scream, that would be great as well. You can have to add like just to the face and not to the dress. You could use a smaller light or try to feather it to try to angle your light. So it's not lighting the whole dress, but instead just the face, you're compressing the exposure right, pumping up the shadows, bringing down the highlights. And then look for a medium background, not too bright, not too dark. So it's just one less element that you have to worry about. So, this is the problem you run into I spot made it on her face here and the dresses way overexposed, no detail at all. And I know that she's not gonna be happy with that. And then the other picture exposed spot meter for the middle of her chest here, The brightest highlight. And when I did that under exposes her face. So I've got this problem, there's just too much tonal range. So we're doing what we what I said before, we got to find a way to build up the shadows bring down the highlights. All right, so this again, these are the two choices and this is what it looks like in in light room. If I turn on my exposure warning when exposed for her face, I turn on the exposure warning for the highlight. All of this has no detail. All of that dress has no detail. But if I conversely go ahead and I correctly exposed for her dress, her eye sockets are pure black. She's definitely not going to be happy with either of these solutions. All right, So here's what you gotta do. You have to introduce some lights into the scene, but try to just light the face. You can feather the light up so that instead of having a light pointed downwards where it lights the whole dress, you try to point it up and you can kind of see that he's doing that pointed more towards her face instead of down the hole dress. Um You can also try to bring the light source way way in the bucket of water. If he holds the light really far back, it's going to light her whole dress. It's throwing the bucket from far back. The water spreads everywhere. But if I bring it really, really close to her face, it'll just be focused. And that's usually what I do for letting a subject with dark skin and a white dress on location, I go ahead and I bring uh flash bender. Really, really close. it just lights their face and then doesn't like the dress. Okay, and then last one multiple skin tones outside. We did that we download it. But um let's go over the essentials again in case you want to reference this. So, multiple skin tones on location, the exposure drastic is drastically different on one person to another. And so what you want to do is a try to get low contrast light, not direct sunlight. Direct sunlight is gonna make it near to impossible to try to get a light subject to be appear dark enough, a dark subject to appear light enough. So you could go ahead and diffuse the scene with a big scrim. You could do that or try to put them in the shade or get them out of that really contrast the light. If you are lighting the scene, you want to put the darker skin tone closer to the light source, whether that's a reflector or whether that's going to be a speed light. So, trying to get the darker skin tone to be more illuminated, and then you feather the light off of the lighter skin tone. So you make sure basically that light that you're pumping into the scene is just hitting the darker skin tone. So you'd expose for the lighter skin tone. And then so that you're bringing down the highlights to be manageable and then bringing up the shadows on the darker skin tone. So, do you like that? Um If you can find a really diffused light source um like I did here, I don't really need to do that much. Um She's still a little bit darker, but let's say you don't have any reflectors, you don't have anything here. This moving truck behind me is hit by the sun and it is a gigantic soft reflector. It's just a big white reflector. So if I have nothing else available to me, try to find some type of natural reflector there and that bounces the light and it's lower contrast. The highlights won't be as bright, the shadows won't be as dark, it's not perfect, but it's pretty good. Okay, so I have them um in another scene, not as much filled, there's still a little bit of Phil there and so I'm going to add, so just add filters, supposed to say to the right, okay guys not left. All right, so I'm adding the field to the right so that it just hits her, it gives him a little bit, but I'm trying to feather it, so mostly I'm pumping in exposure, pumping in light on her. So it's just all about controlling your reflector, bringing her closer to the light source
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