Lessons

Lesson Info

Midday Hard Sun with Godox

in this video, we're to create a convincing but controllable midday sun that you can use anywhere, including night time in the middle of a warehouse alley. So Nick is out here, Molly, for us. And what I want to do is demonstrate to you guys how your new level of lighting knowledge can be used to do anything, including creating son in the middle of the night. So the whole concept here of this first shot is I'm thinking of an action shot, and I'm going to use this kind of playing tope wall behind as a backdrop. What I want to do is actually have Nick doing some sort of cool, like jumping in action, shot too capture with his shadow, dropping right against the wall. But the issue right now is obviously our lighting is really, really bad. So the first thing I need to do is actually create that sunlight. Let's go ahead and take a before shot just so you guys can see what this would look like right now if we were to expose this properly. So I'm gonna go ahead and set this to 1 200 I'm gonna j...

ump right over here. Now, Nick, you're just gonna stay right where you're at, because we're gonna go through a series of before and afters. Okay, I'm gonna use I'm using a standard. This is the 70. It's actually really nice lens. Um, but any lens will do in this situation. I'm just using a standard zoom lens so we can kind of have some flexibility here in our focal length. Take this guy off. Okay, so let's bring that I so up to and I'm going to lower the shutter speed. Let's see what our history rams at. Okay, I want to go right there. So this is what the scene looks like right now at 1 100 F two and 3200 s, so it looks pretty puppy. I mean, we have this nasty, like green gas light that's coming in. It's nighttime crappy shadows. Not a good shot. So what I want to do to re create a midday sun and we need to think through this logically, is a midday sun is going to do several things. One is going to be a very hard pinpoint light. We also have a general fill light. So what I want to do right now and we're going to demonstrate this with a basically 200 watt set up I'd recommend if you guys are gonna buy, we have the Botox is. But I'd recommend flashpoint because you will be warranted through a drama. So we're gonna use this before I switch into pro photo for the rest of the shoot, Because again, I want to demonstrate one more time that you can do this with any gear. But what we have, Kristen, why don't you bring over one of the mag boxes with the 2 200 watt second strobes inside? So we have the mag box, and we have it inside of a 200. Uh, we have 2 200 watt second flashes inside of the mag box. Uh, mag ring. What I want to do is create that general fill light right now, and I have a couple options of doing this. I'm gonna see which one I like best. Let's go ahead and do that now. So what I want to do is adjust my aperture and I s o and everything to eliminate this light first. So now that we took that baseline shot. I'm gonna go ahead and take another shot. This time I'm gonna drop down to 400 s o. We're gonna raise this up to 1 200 a second, and I'm going to go up to F four. We're going to try and erase the majority of this natural light. So now we get this very deep, dark image where you really don't see much, and that's perfect. That's what I want because I don't want any of this natural light showing up in my photograph. So the first thing I wanna do is set up that fill light for the entire scene, like the kind of clouds. And you know what's up in the sky? Whatever. That's gonna light. That's what we're doing right now. So, Kristof, why don't we do that first by bringing that light over here. So what I want to do actually is aimed the light directly into this wall and you can put the light right here. Sorry, brother. Oh, you're strong. He's strong. He works out. He's good. Okay. And then why don't we tilt the head back and aim it up so it hits the top side of the wall. So what I'm trying to do right now is create that large light source that would land on Nick and again if you don't have this guy use the biggest light source you can kind of put your hands on to fill the scene. There is pretty large umbrellas that will do a good job of filling the scene with a decently soft light. You can also angle it so that the shadows fall behind the subject. But most of those shadows will get overwritten when we add the next light. So let's go ahead and get that up there. And I'd say that's pointed back a little bit too much. We're gonna lose a lot of it on the sky. So point it down a little bit or down right there, right there. Perfect. Send that up there. And now I'm gonna power this up to full power because we are bouncing off of a wall and get another shot. Nice. So when you guys see the shot, what you end up seeing is kind of just this very large, soft light source that's lighting up, Nick. The only issue now is that well, everything kind of looks the same level of brightness, and that's not what I want. I want to actually do with something else. So what I'm gonna do is actually switch this to let's go up to F 56 just so we can dim down that light source a little bit. Or you know what? Better yet, let's go to half power so that we can get a little better Recycle time. Nick, you're doing an amazing job holding still, brother, you're like the king of holding. Still, I haven't even touched like it's just it's a beautiful thing. You're you're in the right business right now, so we're at one half power. I'm staying at F four and the reason why I just want to dim down the light a little bit again. I want this to be a Phil, and I might even drop it down a little bit more. So at half power with 2 200 watt second strobes were using so 400 watt seconds down to 200 watt seconds. So let's test this. If not, I might even drop it down to watt seconds. And this is the benefit of doing this at night we can raise the I S o. And I'm just gonna keep talking through that plane. So now I need my second light. Let's go ahead and set up the second right now again when we shoot midday Sun The sky is one of our largest light sources, right? It's filling everything in the scene and then the sun is overriding on top of that. And that's why we get that blue light in the shadows. If you guys noticed when you guys go out the shadows underneath the car the shadows that you're making in a midday sun when the sky is blue those shadows are actually blue. So I'm gonna also gel this light blue so that we cast a blue light over the scene and then we're gonna override it with that beam. So this is the wide angle lens. Keep in mind that when you're using the lens is the one that is notched is the wide angle lens so you can see a little not right here. Also, the grooves need to go inside towards the flash. Okay, so remember grooves inside towards the flash. This should give us a much more defined light. So why don't you take it up just a little bit? Let's just test the light real quick. Mhm. Yeah. All right, that's fantastic. So now you can see that very hard edged shadow that's actually getting defined on the wall. And you can see exactly what I'm talking about and that it's it's yellow that that light sources yellow because it's coming off this wall and it doesn't look like daylight. I want to make sure one more thing to that. I'm shooting actual daylight in my camera. Tisk, Tisk. There we go. Okay, so I'm set to daylight. Okay, so we have more blue tones, but still not quite enough. Okay, so what we're gonna do now? That light looks fantastic, though, with that beam on there. And it's kind of filling out the whole scene. That looks great. So let's go ahead and bring this down and let's put the blue gel onto it so I'll actually bring it down. Why don't you go grab the blue gel? What's up, Nicole? This is Nicole, everybody. Nicole, come say hi. Behind the trash cans are you are? Yes, second assistant. I'm watching Nicole's our lead trainer for Linenger's photography, so she knows her stuff. Okay, we're gonna pop in that blue gel. And by the way, let's talk about flash power real quick on this small strobe. I'm shooting at 1/8 power right now. So remember, that's not a lot of light. This is like a 50 60 watt second light, right? So one half of the 25 1 quarter it would be 12 18 would be around 5 to 10 seconds between there. So it's not a lot of power that you need, especially when you're doing this at night time. If you're doing a daytime, well, that just doesn't make sense, because why not just use the sun? Does that make sense? Why? Why would you do that? No. Full blue. Do we have a half blue? That's it. That looks like it's purple half CTV. So this is the magma half CTB. Let's pop this in there. Some of you might be asking, Do we need the focus diffuser for this? Kind of Not really, um, it's nice because it keeps all the light on the wall. It doesn't really do much, though. If we had a light source like this that we're bouncing off of. We really don't need it. That's good. Okay. Yes. Now I want to show you these two steps in action so you guys can see this, So I'm gonna turn off, be for just a moment so you guys can see what happened here. So here is that natural fill light. So everything the scene kind of gets that natural, Blue Phil. And now we add in our second light, which is gonna be our son. We have this, and all we're gonna do now is find a better position. So we're ready to go. So now all we're gonna do is bring this light just over to here. Let's show what it's gonna look like I'm gonna actually light from right here, So that kind of glances right off the side of him. There you go. And we're just going to basically put them in a position after that and do our shot. So let's take a look at this. There we go. Nicole, come. Look at this. Does this not look like daylight? That's amazing. I actually wanna put you against the wall and let's bring you off a little bit like maybe right here. What kind of testing? Adjust. But I want to do, like, fun, Like jumping like action shots where you're kind of like looking like arms out. Kind of featuring the clothing movement, you know, fun stuff. I don't what I'm talking about, man, you're the professional. So let's bring the light, actually, right here and let's boom it up just a little bit. So that light source drops down and I might have you adjust. All right, You ready? Okay. 32 Action. Mhm. That's tight, dude. Okay, so we're gonna make a small tweak to the shadow, so I want the shadow to be a little bit less, so we need to pull it back, actually, pull it back to about right here. So the reason is you'll see in the shot that the shadows actually very far extended down the wall, and it doesn't give me, like, a very pleasing shape to it. What I want is almost like a repeated pattern of his body against the wall. Yeah. Okay. So let's see where that shadow is going to land. Come over this way a little more. Okay. Go this way A little more. Probably have to. Don't use the Don't use the sandbags until we get in place. So this take the sandbags off, and then let's move it a little bit and then move the whole stand. This way. There you go. Now angle the head. There you go. Angle the head back this way. Perfect. Just like that. Let's test that real quick. Don't put a sandbag on it. Um, you know what, Nick? Why don't you face the camera quick so I can see where the shadow is gonna fall? Mhm there Since the lights coming from this side. Dude, I'm gonna have you do your jumps and stuff facing this way. Um, yeah, let's let's do a few different ones. You think you can do them stationary from the center? Yeah. Again. I can serve. Okay, Plan and then industry. Okay. You ready on your brother? Okay, that is sick. Dude, do that just right up against the edge of the wall. So go even close to the wall right there one more time. Yes, Freaking a. Okay, hold on one second. I'm gonna show you. I'm gonna show you, Nick. And then so you can see what it looks like. So I'm gonna lower my camera angle now, because since we're not on a backdrop, we could bust out the backdrop. But again, the point of this is kind of anywhere, Any background whatsoever. We can get our shots, so I'm just gonna lower this down. So that way we can give his feet some breathing room. So when he jumps, we get him purely against the white Mhm. Rather do one where you're standing in the middle and then, uh, maybe, like, get both hands out. Where? Like, you're kind of hopping. I don't I know that doesn't look very good. It's all right. I know it doesn't. I'm not I'm not a model. I'm not trying to make Stop it. All right, Go for it. Yeah. Yes, that's it. That is bad ass. Dude, come check this out. You gotta come see this. It would be cool to get the shadow. Just I think I think lowering the light a little bit to get the shadow going almost right onto the wall right behind him. You can see how his head is behind his shoulder right now to save money. Yeah. So lower it by like maybe 2 ft. I'm powering it up to one quarter power on that guy just to give us a slightly stronger edge on that light. And on your brother. Dude, do that again. Just right against the wall. They get close to that wall right there. Yes. Mm. More time. Yes. More time. Yeah. Nailed it. That was it. Okay. So real quick. I powered up that flash to one quarter power. So now we went from 50 watt seconds. 25 were about 10 to 15 seconds worth of juice on him, so we can get a slightly stronger edge in a slightly stronger shadow. I can't. I can't talk right now. It's fine. I just wanna take pictures right there. Shoulder right against it. There you go. Okay. Okay. Perfect. Yeah. Money. Yeah, we see the last one. You got it. You stop. Stop right there. You got on this last one? Hold on. Yep. We got it. Mhm. Yeah. Yeah, for these tight shots, can you give me a little more angle and get it up just a little bit higher? So let's go to about right here. Okay? Uh huh. And then a little bit higher. Let me. Just check that out. Yep, that's it. That's it. Perfectly. Give me one where you get it? Close up. Keep your face right there. Right there. Let's finish this out just by reviewing those steps once again. So we start here on the top, left with that natural light. Kind of that green. Nasty fluorescent light. No good. We knock that light out and we add in our own Phil, like, coming off the wall again. If you don't have a gigantic wall behind you, that makes complete sense. Just use an umbrella. The largest umbrella you have put up on a stand, you're going to get a good and convincing effect with that. But the issue here is that we don't have what we have just one light source and it looks like we just added flash to the scene the color temp is off to. So the next option is basically we put that blue gel onto it. So now we have the blue gel, and we're filling the scene with blue light, but we're still missing the sunlight that pinpoint light that would be lighting our subject and leaving our shadows on the blue side. Remember Why are we going blue again? Because a blue sky would reflect blue light into a scene. So wherever there wasn't sunlight touching that scene, we would have kind of a bluish sort of shadow. So then, right here we have that pin light being added. And now we have that nice blue shadow. We have a very convincing daylight effect, but we still need to edit those shots. So let's go and do that. Now, I've given you guys three different files that you guys can work with. The editing process is going to be identical regardless of whichever ones you decide to use. So let's go ahead and jump to the exercise files. And I think it be fun to edit this wider shot so I can show you guys how we would put the entire thing onto white. Um, and the first thing I'm gonna do you'll notice that there's a couple issues with this. So with the magazine that I used or with whatever modifier that I had on that flash, we noticed that the top of the frame, which I couldn't see in camera the top of frame was a little bit, um, uncovered. So when I we're actually gonna do this exact same shot with Pro photo. In the next tutorial, we're gonna do a slightly more stylized version of it. Um, it's just gonna be a short little case study. You'll notice that we get a bit better seen coverage with that just bare light. So I probably would just modify this and just use a bearable flash and make sure that you hit the entire background. Otherwise, you're gonna have a little bit of work in Post, which we will have here. Let's go ahead and grab a white balance and we're pretty close to spot on there. What I'm gonna do is start brightening my highlights a bit as well as my white point. So I'm going to let this kind of raw adjustment in and of itself do a lot of the heavy lifting for me. The only issue is I want to make sure I don't like blow out his ankles or anything like that. So I'm going to lift it to about right here and then that's good anymore. And I'm going to start kind of blowing out the rest of the, uh, the highlights in the image What I'm also going to do is lift the shadows and we can lift quite a bit to about maybe 35. And I'm going to lower my blacks a little bit while also this go around raising the overall exposure in the scene just a little. So this is where again I'm going to look at those ankles and see if it got a little bit too bright. I can go ahead and pull my whites down a little bit more just to bring his ankles back, and I'm going to bring the exposure down as well. Okay, so the bottom half of the images nicely exposed the top half, not so much. So let's just grab a graduated filter, pull it down from the top and what we're gonna do is select just a dodge brush. So I want to 0. exposure. I'm gonna pull down from the top and correct that exposure from the top. What I'm going to look at is kind of where the line needs to drop across and kind of how much we need to add to the shot to get a convincing. It looks like about a 0.8 adjustment and kind of leaving it over the hip where it kind of extends a little bit in the bottom. But I'm gonna decrease the feather so we don't get to the feet all the way. Good. This looks much better. Okay, so already we've come quite a way. So here's where the original was, and now we're here. What I'm gonna do now is just add a little bit of clarity. I'm going to add a little bit of contrast. Okay? I'm also going to warm up the shot just a bit right about here. I'm also gonna add profile correction without vignette, because I want the edges of the frame to be as as bright as possible. In fact, even with profile correction on, we're still not getting so. All we did was turn on this profile correction right here. So even with that, we can still see the corners are getting a little bit dark. So what I might do, actually is drop in a radio filter, so just select the radio burn narrow. Um, if you don't have that, just go ahead and drop in a radio filter right over our subject. But instead of burning, we're actually going to reverse it. So we're just gonna brighten up the edges of the frame once again. I don't want his feet to really be covered. So the easiest way to do that I can expand the size of this and kind of work to make sure that his feet are outside of the range. But another easy way of kind of making sure his feet aren't in there is just to use this little mask. So we have a mask option where we can actually just brush out. So holding an altar option, I can just make sure this effect really isn't touching his feet. Okay, In fact, we can just kind of paint outside of this a little bit to expand this a little bit. Make sure that this whole area is not touched. So what that does is essentially, it just kind of reshapes the mask a little bit. And then now we can have a little more freedom and kind of raising exposure a little bit on the outside edges, raising the highlights. Oh, let's see here. Now we're affecting the brush. So let's go to edit. There we go. Let's go ahead and raise the highlight point on the outsides. Raise the white point on the outsides, and we can start seeing that we're starting to knock it out a little bit. I want to bring it back a bit. Let's keep it right there where it's white. But it's not like blown out, so I'm gonna raise it as high as we can without actually blowing out the background. Okay, so this looks great, but you'll notice that now. We still have that cement in the shot. And we can still tell that we're kind of shooting against the wall versus, like, a clean backdrop. So let's just fix that press. Control your command, E. We're going to take this into Photoshop for just a moment. I'm gonna show you a couple quick tricks, okay? So once we're inside, I'm gonna go ahead and just duplicate my layer. I'm also gonna go full screen to give us a little more screen real estate. Let's just zoom in a bit. So I'm going to make quick work of this little piece on the bottom by just selecting it with my, uh this is my rectangular marquee tool. Okay, so I'm gonna select the whole thing hit shift, backspace. And if you thought I was going to use content where you're absolutely 100% right, I'm gonna let Photoshop do all the heavy lifting. Now it's going to probably screw up this little shadow on his foot. Um, no, actually, that's perfect. That's exactly what I wanted. Um, so we're gonna have to fix that separately. So what we can do first, though, is I'm going to grab my my welcome tablet real quick and let's just do this. Let's let's sample, Let's press s to select our clone stamp tool and let's sample and just kind of get this bottom section to actually be white, where it needs to be white. Well, the nice thing about a background like this is I can literally rather than healing stuff. I can literally just paint white because we're trying to have a kind of even white, non textured background and granted, if you screw something up like that, you know what? Maybe it's just better to do the close down because there is some areas of this that look like they're brighter than others. So it's easier to probably just heal those out. Okay, I've got spots on my screen and then I'm actually trying to fix. But there are spots on my screen and not on the image. You guys ever do that yourselves. So if it looks like I'm, like, you know, a little whacked out and like clicking something that I shouldn't, it's because it's on my screen. Okay, I'm going to go ahead and remove some of the blemishes from the wall. Yeah, and see, I can see my because of the clone stamp. It was selecting areas that were a little bit brighter. I can see a little bit of transition over there, so I'm just going to make sure that that's good. Now, the other thing we can do is just hold down, shift J and select our patch tool. And we can just patch over other areas, too. And that will make quick work of it as well. Okay, so now I'm gonna work inside the shadow, and I'm going to just kind of clean up the shadow a bit. I'm gonna sample up here to select this area, the shadow, and kind of just duplicated and clean up his his shadow. Just so we have a nice, clean edge. I'm gonna go ahead and select my clone stamp, and I'm going to work in here holding on altar, option to sample and just clicking to clean up his shadow. Okay, it's looking a lot better. So now what I wanna do is I need to figure out how I'm gonna repair. And by the way, by all means, if you want to get in there a little bit, Carlo, don't even say we're going to re record that because of the airplane, because I'm not. So if you want to get in there a little bit and just fine tune you totally are. Welcome to I just want to go a little quick for this. Okay? So all I'm going to do now is just press l to select my lasso tool. And I'm gonna select this part of the shoe press control Jr commander to jump that to a new layer and then press V to grab what? I just jumped to a new layer and move it over here. And that's perfect. I just want his total look like it's broken and pointing straight down. Um, but if you don't want is totally broken and pointing straight down press control to your command. T rotate this and then we're just going to shrink it to kind of rebuild the point of his shoe. Okay, so I'm just going to bring it to the right size. The man's got big shoes. Would you not agree with that, Carlo? Yeah, those are big shoes. Dude, look at that. So I'm looking at the size of this. You up here and making sure that the size of the issue is roughly is roughly accurate. Okay, so that looks pretty good. I'm gonna go ahead and hold down all control shift, e. Um, just so we can bring everything to a new layer. So I just merged everything to a new layer, actually. Know what? I'm going to undo that and increase the size of this just real quick. So let's increase the size to make sure that we have it lined up correctly, and I'm gonna turn this a little bit. There we go. It looks better. What do you think, Carlo? You just agreeing to agree Like nobody likes a yes man. Dude, he's got my check. Yeah, you're right. I kind of do like a yes man. anyway, That's nice. Let me just I'm moving my using my cursor right now. I'm pressing V and selecting that layer, just using my cursor to kind of move it around and make a little fine tuning adjustments. But this looks good right here. I'm gonna hold all control shift ear option command shifty, and merge all this to a new layer. Because now what we're gonna do is just kind of blend here. So using my sampling tool, I'm just kind of sampling and painting in where there's a little edge right here. I'm gonna go ahead and select that with my patch tool, and I'm gonna go ahead and just drag it and kind of sample and kind of get these two areas blended. And then Oh, look at that. We have a rebuilt shoe right there. Okay. If there's areas right here, that looks kind of odd. Just sample them patch. Sorry. I mean, patch, patch them by selecting the patch tool, dragging the other areas. Okay, so that's how we would kind of rebuild that to get his shadow and we get a nice clean wall. Now. I'm gonna go ahead and save this out. There's one other fun trick that I can show you guys now that we have him over just a white, transparent background. One thing that's fun to do is to actually change the overall crop of the image. Because now we can actually pull the we can actually pull the image out. So if I wanted to expand the size of this, I can actually expand this out and then hold down or press content aware and press enter. Now, if Photoshop doesn't want to feel like putting in squirrels and whatnot, um, it should just put in a white background. But who knows? It just depends on it's moot. Apparently, Photoshop more white into an image takes NASA level computing power. Wow, Photoshop. That was brilliant. What Photoshop felt like was missing in this image was a deep, dark son that was sucking light from the top left of the image. So, look, just go ahead and select that this is something that I like to do with some of these kind of images, just to kind of create extra space working space in the file. Um, and I'm not even going to worry about the fact that you know, that it's getting a little bit darker on the top. I think I thought that I wanted that, but I don't really want that. But regardless, we can just go back into light room and and make quick work of that with a little adjustment. So let's just go back to that room. The reason why I sometimes like to do this is because I can give myself a lot of room. And if we're talking about, like, something that might we want wanted to go like commercial. Um, this is actually quite useful to have that because we have space for text in the frame and we can kind of choose the crop and leave him over in the corner and kind of have this, like, nifty little negative space shot type thing. But if we wanted to kind of fix that, all we would do is just add an exposure brush. And what that do you know where I just clicked? I don't know where I just clicked. Something happened. Something not so magical happened. Both. Yeah. No, I don't know. I don't know. There. Oh, man. Oh, man. Doing all right, buddy? All right. Let rooms dinner. right now, we're back. Okay, So I'm just going to drag in from the top, and then I'm gonna use that same kind of like highlight feature and the same white feature just to knock it out. And then we're gonna use the same brush feature to paint it off and make sure that he's not painted in. So now we can have, like, an even kind of white along the background. Very easy. Simple fix. Now we have plenty of working space. So anyway, this is a fun little trick, guys, you don't have to, you know, save this out as whatever crop you want. But I do want to show you the final kind of before and after of this scene. So let's go ahead and go back to kind of one of the original crops. So let's put them right there and let's just go ahead and take a look at that raw file. Okay, so there we have that final looking image, and I think this is a really fun look to be able to create midday sun anywhere, including inside of a studio outside of a studio. You can create a really cool, commercialized look and vibe with this controllable mid afternoon sun and any background that you want. So take this play with it, put it in your pocket and smoke it. It's a reference to another video. Let's go on.