Lessons

Lesson Info

Skin Essentials: Mixed Lighting, Color Contamination

mixed lighting would mean let's say you're in a room and you've got a big window over here and then a nice bright tungsten lamp over here and so it ends up looking like is really, really yellow. The side of the face really, really blew this side of the face because daylight is blue and tungsten is yellow and that does not look nice on skin tones. Um and it's a huge pain and as I said, there are ways to fix it in post, but we would like to be awesome photographers and not have to fix it in post. Um So let's talk about some of the options you have here first and foremost, if you can avoid it at all costs, do like if you have the ability to like, wow, there's really bright windows, like let's say it's an event really, really huge bank of windows and there's overhead tungsten lights, but they're not contributing anything, You can go sneak and turn them off and not get yelled at by like the event coordinator do it, it's gonna make your job easier really, if it's not contributing, I barely n...

oticed. So that used to be my trick. Um so try to avoid it at all costs if you can't avoid it. Basically what you have to do is you got to pick one, Am I going to white balance for the windows? Are, am I going to white balance for the tungsten lights and then you add a stroke to overpower the one you don't like. So let's take a look at what that might look like. This is um an image in a series that I shot with eric Vallon, we taught a class um called conquering crappy lighting, so, and that's what he was talking about. The populating in the beginning. If you miss that was funny. So I walk into the scene and over here is a big window, so this is all blue light and then over here in the back is a very pretty lamp and it is very, very yellow. So if you look at her face it is blue and yellow and definitely not flattering. It's definitely not what I want her skin tone to look like. So I know for sure the way that I want to go Is going to be to pick one. So let's say, I can't turn off the overhead lights. All I did, she's just facing the window. Okay, so just pretend that doesn't exist. She's just facing the window and I'm writing this way, This is what happens at four am you know, I'm gonna get yelled at. Um so she's facing the window and the camera shooting her that way. So yeah, if you look, she definitely has yellow on her hair and it's definitely yellow in the background, but her skin looks good and that's all we care about because this is a skin class. Another thing that you can also consider is if you do not have anything like you don't have a flash to overpower the scene and so you've got mixed light and you're stuck with it have a couple things that can kind of help you out. So one of them that I've used in the past um it's called a Spyder cube. Okay, hold it still and this thing is actually really cool. It's just like your it's your great card but like super on steroids, it's really cool because what you've got is you've got a lot of different things here, you've got your neutral points. This is actually for speculate highlights because when you're trying to set your exposure um when you're judging, you don't actually care if speculate highlights like like really bright highlights are white, they're supposed to be what you don't want is white to become overexposed. So this is for imposed, you can shoot this and gauge that. Here's your neutral point and then in here it's called black trap. So that will be true solid black because light can't get in there. But what's nice about this is if you hold it out in the scene, I can get the white balance is for both sides. So if anyone has ever used smart filters or double processing, I can take a picture of this white balance once for this sign white balance wants to the other and combine them. If you had no choice, this would be the option that I would go for now borrowing that that doesn't work or that you don't have one of those which I think they're pretty cool. Um if that doesn't work, if you do have an expo disk, you can, if it's like there's window over here and there's like a little bit of tungsten getting in and it's a little bit mixed and it's no priest that's going to work and it just looks messy. You can use an expo disk and just hold it where the subject is and just try to capture the light of the scene. It'll help get closer. Mixed light is still not going to be pretty, but it's going to be improved for your skin tones. So that would be the process that I would walk through. Pick a white balance overpower the light that I don't like by jelling my flash to match where I set my white balance for use a color checker or one of those spider cubes. And then after that, if I don't have also used an expedition, okay, Number three is color contamination. This is, I know a huge one that people don't see you don't realize. So this is something you have to train yourself to be familiar with what colors are messing up your scene and unfortunately there are many things to do this. How many people have photographed a family in a park and they are bright green, the whole family because it is being colored contaminated by the light bouncing off the green grass and they look sickly and not good. So let's talk about color contamination. This is a huge one um, that I had to figure out on my own and honestly I didn't really figure it out until recently. So let's talk about this. Um, so unwanted color. What I want you to do is I want wherever your environment is, wherever you are shooting to look around and look beyond the obvious. Everybody goes on location, sticks their subject under the tree and says, okay, well my light sources the sun but there in the shade, so it's shade white balance. Not quite, especially when you have that situation where the sun is bouncing off the green grass. Green grass is bouncing onto your subjects and now they're green. So what I want you to do is go to whatever environment you're in and try to figure out actually what the light source is. It might be the open sky, it might be the green grass, there might be light bouncing off of a red wall. So you want to look at those things. The other things that can cause problems with color contamination is clothing, either the subjects or their assistance. So you've probably seen instances where someone has for example, a bright pink or bright purple top on really bright purple and all of a sudden they have a nice purple glow underneath their chin. Um, so let's let's take a look at these and what you can do. All right. So I told you analyze the scene. So let's start with the reflective grass, the problem is the green and yellow tones in the face. Okay, so it's not actually super easy, which is probably why a lot of you have a problem with it. What one thing you can do is move them and what I mean by that is you're like, wait, okay. So I have my subjects in the shade, let's say there in the shade of a tree And you're standing in the sun and maybe like four ft from them is where the shade line ends and then the sun hits the grass Because of that, the light source on their faces. Actually just all that light four ft away, bouncing off the green grass. So if you could put them deeper in shade, that's going to help a little bit. But another one that I would often do is I would put them like I won't put this in my photo but I would put my subjects in the shade of all the beautiful green in the background. But right where I'm standing is a nice neutral colored sidewalk. I don't need to include it in my frame. Like I can use a parking lot. I can use whatever concrete. And so if I have that where the light is bouncing instead of a giant Greenfield, it doesn't need to be in my frame. But now I have nice glowing white light source instead. So I have a couple images that show this and actually some of them, One of them is from a workshop that I just did. So looking at the image here where she is in this scene is actually we're photographing her, this is workshop. I just didn't Sweden. Um and so if you look see the shade line right there, she's in the shade, but her light source is all of the sun bouncing off this grass and hitting her. And she's got a little bit from the side over here. This is from the open sky, this is not from sun, this is um it's an opening in the trees. So this is actually nice and correctly color toned because it's just open shade, but on this side of her face is all of that green reflection, greenish yellow from the grass. So if I could, if I could move her in the shade and maybe over on this side, there's a sidewalk. If I could move her over there and stand her near the sidewalk, it's going to help me because I don't have that green reflecting. But another option and let me just zoom in the more times you can see, okay, this is going to be green. This is going to be neutral, but another option is to pop in a little bit of light and this is where people go overboard is they think, okay, I'm gonna be using strobe on location. So I need to go, you know, to stops above ambient and make the background. Like just because you're using strobe on location doesn't need mean it needs to look like a flash shot. I don't think that this looks like a flash photographs doesn't look like strobe was used in this image to me at least. But all I'm trying to do is just overpower some of this green, some of this yellow by kicking in just a little bit of light. So you could do this with an off camera flash creativelive has lots of classes on speed lights and off camera flash. You could also do this with the studio strobe on location if that's what you're more comfortable with. Or you could also try to do this with a reflector. I tend to lean more towards the reflector route. That's, that's kind of how I like to work. So let me show you another example, kind of same idea. Oh, and in this picture, I have the new pro photo B1, it's just bare bulb turned way down and I'm just kicking in just a little bit of light on her face just to get rid of some of that green and some of that yellow and also improves a little bit more of the contrast with a little muddy. She didn't have many catch lights in her eyes because the light was coming from below and to the side. So it actually improves the quality of light. Alright, so reflective environments, but it's not, it's not just the grass that's going to be a problem. It's anything and I see people make a mistake about this all the time. So here's an instance of this being a problem. This side of her face is super duper red and pink because when I was shooting her, she's standing next to a red and pink wall. That's not what's hitting her face. But there is enough light bouncing around that. It's going to give me color contamination. So all I had her do is take five steps forward and that problem is gone. I'm just making sure that that red wall is not reflecting on that side of her face. So just try to analyze your scene. I think that's the biggest thing that I would recommend is take a look where is there a color problem? Like if you have a girl posing in the middle of the street and there's a bright blue car that bright blue car is definitely influencing your shot. I have no doubt of it in the middle of the day. So take a look at that, but it gets a little bit more complicated. Let's take a look at a couple other things, reflective clothing and I don't even mean reflective, It's not like they're wearing like space suits. I mean, like I'm talking about bright colored clothing and if somebody has a bright red or bright pink shirt, it will cause some damage to the skin tones and we can see that pretty blatantly. But the big one that people forget is your assistance. I have a rule on my sets. Okay. I'm a fashion photographer so I can make rules on my sets. It's nice. Um but the rule is all my assistants have to be wearing black at all times always because with him standing here holding this reflector, this entire side of her face is pink, pinkish. What is salmon net or whatever. Um but it's more than that. If he's wearing a light gray shirt, maybe a whitish gray shirt, it's still going to influence the image because it's going to bounce the lights going to bounce off of him and fill in those shadows. The only thing I can have my assistants wear that isn't affecting my actual image and actual skin tones is solid black. So everybody has to wear solid black. Um the last one that people really overlook is unwanted ambient light and I absolutely had this problem. My first studio. All right. So my very first studio was um I think it was like 10.5 or 12 ft wide By 17ft deep and 8.5 ft ceilings with fluorescent lights. And so I would take more dramatically lit images of men and I never ever understood why their skin always looked green because what I was doing is I was shooting in a way that actually that fluorescent light in the ceiling was showing up in my strobe lit pictures even though I didn't intend it to and this can happen. You don't have to be shooting um really high I. S. O. S. In really long shutter speeds for this to happen. So let me let me explain what this means and how this how this affects your image. Um One way to avoid this, I'm going to give you the setup is when you're shooting in the studio and you do not want color contamination from your overhead lights or your windows you're gonna want to shoot at or near your sync speed. So all of our cameras have a maximum shutter speed where it can still talk to the strobes and work before you start seeing the curtains for mine for example it's one to hundreds of a second. Um I should have Canon five D. Mark three even at 1 200 of a second I start to see like the corner of the of the shutter. So I usually shoot at 1 1/60 of a second. Another thing that you want to do is try to turn off the ambient light. If you can go ahead and turn off the tongue stands overhead or close the curtains from the windows, try to get rid of anything that's going to be affecting the tones in your pictures. And then the next thing that you want to do is when you go to shoot make sure you take off your trigger, You've got your camera all set to what you think your exposure is going to be for the studio strobe and take a picture. You should see nothing when you're shooting in the studio and you take a picture with your studio strobes and then you take that off. If you take a picture without the strobes and you still see that person, what it means is that the ambient light in the room is recording whether it's the window or the tungsten or the fluorescence and that color that's recording is messing up your skin tones, I have no doubt, and it's going to show up most predominantly in the shadows.