- When taking iPhone portraits
with Apple studio lighting effects,
it's all too often the same old story.
(upbeat music)
Unprofessional photo effects.
(upbeat music)
They're all bad.
(bang)
But with just about $30 worth of household items,
you can take much more professional
and natural looking portraits.
Hey Siri, make me professional.
(twinkling)
Good headshots matter,
especially if you're applying for jobs now
and trying to look the part.
Or if you're just trying to impress somebody on the 'grams.
So, if you can't swing
a professional photographer right now,
you can just use your iPhone.
Our iPhone cameras have gotten so good
and that's not just the Pro models.
You can take good photos with pretty much
any recent iPhone.
To take a photo like this, all you need
are a few things from the hardware store,
a special app that lets you shoot in Raw,
which is a different image format,
and some fairly common household items.
So, let's get started.
Step one, buy a quality light bulb.
Head online or to your local hardware store
and buy an LED bulb with a high CRI and R9 rating.
You can find them at Home Depot, Lowes, and even Amazon.
The gist is CRI is short for color rendering index.
It measures the light's ability
to illuminate colors accurately.
The bottom line, the higher a CRI and R9 rating,
the better and more flattering the light will look
on you and your skin.
Chances are you don't have this kind of bulb at home,
but if you wanna check a bulb that you do have,
try and find the original box.
Some sort of rating should be printed on it.
Or you can just Google the model number.
So, what's this gonna cost you?
About 20 bucks for this high CRI LED bulb
and about $10 for this clamp light.
Step two, download a raw friendly app.
Today, we're gonna be using Halide,
which is available for $5.99 in the app store.
Halide gives you more manual controls
than the iPhone's built-in camera app,
like ISO and shutter speed.
It can also capture images in standard formats
like JPEG or HEIC, but adds an important third, raw.
Raw also gives you tremendous power over your images
after you've taken them.
You can easily change colors or the white balance
and recover dark shadows or bright highlights.
Step three, set up your lighting.
Believe it or not, you can accomplish a lot
with just one light and some curtains.
First, find a space where you can black out
all available light.
A dark wall or fabric is great if you have one,
but if not, just use any old wall, curtain, or fabric.
The less reflective, the better.
Second, find something you can afix the clamp light to,
like a coat rack.
(upbeat music)
Third, put your light at a 45 degree angle above,
and a 45 degree angle to the side of your subject.
Now you're gonna want to diffuse the light
until any shadows across your face soften up.
Without any diffusion,
the shadows are way too harsh and unnatural.
Let's add a piece of parchment paper
to help soften it up a little.
Ah, that looks a little better.
Now let's add a white t-shirt.
If you don't have anything to put the diffusion shirt on,
you'll need another person to hold it.
Sadly, cloning isn't possible.
Ah, that looks much better.
You can use pretty much any sheer, white fabric
to diffuse light.
Sheets work really well, too.
Now, either with the help of a friend or a tripod,
open Halide and frame up your shot.
If you don't have someone to help you take the photo,
but you do have a tripod,
why not have Siri lend a hand.
Open the app's advance settings
and set up the Siri shortcut feature.
Hey Siri, make me professional.
(camera shutter clicks)
You can use the auto settings in the app
or you can adjust the manual controls.
If you don't wanna get fancy with all this raw stuff,
you can use the default camera app as well.
Those photos turned out pretty darn well, too.
Don't worry if that raw image looks a little flat,
we'll get to that in the next step.
Step four, edit your photo.
Since raw isn't a standard format,
you're gonna need a special application
with a raw processor to open it.
For the sake of cost, let's go with one of my favorites,
Darkroom, which is free.
But if you wanna use the fancy filters,
it'll cost you a few bucks.
First, I cropped the image.
You lose some resolution,
but for most web applications and social, this is fine.
Then I used one of Darkroom's filters.
From there, thanks to the power of raw,
I was able to heavily adjust the exposure
and bring in some of the highlights.
And voila!
A studio lit portrait
that now won't make you the laughing stock of LinkedIn.
This is just a tiny glimpse
into the wonderful world of studio lighting.
Try it out on your own or with friends, kids, whomever.
Send them to me.
Have fun.