In this video
I'm going to show you three different ways to separate a subject from a dark
background
in the studio.
Adorama TV presents
Take and Make great photography with Gavin Hoey.
Hello I'm Gavin Hoey and you are watching Adorama TV. Booty by Adorama,
the camera store that has everything for us photographers,
and once again you join me in my small home studio. This video is
all about separation lights, I'll explain that in just a minute.
But first of all, let me introduce Fearne. Say hello Fearne. Hello. She's going to be the model for today
and we're going to do dark backgrounds. That's where separation lights really come in,
so we are going to be shooting against my
my grey background, but you might be using a black background
anything that's quite dark can give you problems
that may require separation. But first of all, Let's just take a picture
with one single key light, this is my favorite single light setup
and I'll show you why a separation light can be really important.
First thing to do of course is the meter for the light,
so I've got my flash meter, pop it underneath Fearne's chin, pointing at the light,
it tells me f 5.6, so that's the aperture i'm going to dial into my
camera.
Let's take a shot, Ok Fearne here we go. Wonderful,
One more. Perfect. We've got a lovely lit
portrait, it's correctly exposed, Fearne looks amazing. But,
the shadow parts of the picture really disappear
into the shadows. That black background is recording
very very dark even though in fact it's grey, but of course with this lighting
setup,
not much light reaches it, so it's coming out much darker than you see on the
video.
So how do we stop Fearne disappearing into the black?
Well that's where the separation light comes in.
So I've got a second light here, now there's a few ways you can do this, in fact there
are many ways that you can do this.
I'm going to show you two. First one is simply to use
the separation light as a hair light, so
if I get my light set up and we'll put it a little bit higher maybe,
like that so it comes down from above
and i've got a little, nice little feature here with a streetlight
that I can actually turn on a small lamp
at the front, which will allow me to see where this light is going,
It's a little bit like a laser pointer, I can make sure that it hits
Fearne's head. If you're using full size studio lights of course you might have a modelling
light in there,
but with the smaller streetlights that little thing can be real time saver.
Ok so, let's take a shot like that with our second light in place.
Here we go, and again.
Lovely, fantastic. So
as you can see we get a hair light that illuminates Fearne's hair,
it really does make her stand out from the background
and gives a much more dramatic look to the shot.
Now that might be exactly what you want. If it is, Brilliant stop there,
but there's another way you could use a second light. That is, rather than
lighting Fearne, we could use the second light
to light the background. So let's bring the light down
and we'll change the angle. Once again I can use the fact that it has this little
built in red spot which you may not see in the video because these
video lights are pretty bright, but I can use that to make sure that the center of my
light
hits straight behind Fearne's head, and we'll take a shot like that.
Now what should happen is that light lights the background,
the key light lights Fearne's face. Let's see how it goes.
Here we go, Wonderful.
And again, Perfect.
As you can see we have a great light in the background, a little splash of light
back there.
Now remember this is adjustable, it is on whatever power it just happened to be on,
I didn't change it, I didn't meter it.
But reviewing the pictures, I can make an educated decision so
is that light too big, too bright, if it is I can make it brighter or darker,
I think that maybe it's a little bit dim, let's make it a bit brighter. One of the nice things about the
street light is I can increase the power from here on the remote,
so one, two, three clicks, that's one more
stop of light from our background light. Ok let's try that again.
Here we go, Fabulous.
As you can see a much bigger spot of light, a much more
dramatic background light,
the choice is yours, you could even add a gel onto here
and gel that background. Now if you want to find out more about gels and how
they can be used,
don't forget to check out my previous video, which you will find on Adorama
Learning Centre. So what if you don't have a second light?
What if you only have one light? Can you still get separation?
So you can but it's a little bit different than using two lights.
So let's just change things around and we'll set that up right now.
So now, we're just down to a
single
light, and although we can't get the same effect that we had with two lights,
we can still get quite a good effect with just a small adjustment
in the setup, and my small adjustment is to ask Fearne
to step back so you're against the background, now it does help to have a
background that really works for you, so if you have a cloth background you want to
make sure that it is perfectly smooth and wrinkle-free
or you do what I do and have a background that is very wrinkly and
use that, so this has got a great little texture, because I need to bring the
light back
towards Fearne, like so, I've also brought it back towards the background so any
little wrinkles and textures
in the background will be shown in the picture, but what will happen now
is our key light will light both the background and Fearne at the same time,
and in effect we'll have a separation, that background won't go black
because one light is lighting two things. Ok,
we need to re-meter for the light, anytime you move the light
from the the model or vice versa you need to actually re-meter, so let's just take a
meter reading here, and our meter reading is exactly the same
because although I moved the light the relative distance remained
stable. So f5.6 again, let's just take some shots
and see how this looks. Ok, Are you ready Fearne? Here we go.
One more, here we go. Perfect, fantastic.
Well that was really great fun. Did you enjoy that? I really did. Brilliant shoot and three very
different looks
to get separation from your model and the background.
Now all I need to do is get my favorite picture into photoshop and do a quick edit
and we're going to do that right now.
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In an ideal world getting your lights
right means that you do
relatively little work inside a Photoshop because you nailed the shot
in camera and that's always what we're trying to achieve.
In this case I'm, I'm almost there, I've almost
got it absolutely correct but of course there's always a bit of Photoshop to do.
Now of the three different separation lights, the one that I think needed the
most work
was the single one light setup and I guess that's not too surprising.
Having said that, it was also the one that I enjoyed the most from the final
picture set.
So let's have a little look and see what I did. So this is the picture and as you can see
it's almost
right, I'm kind of happy with it, there is only a couple of things I want to change.
First of all we have got Fearne here with lovely pale skin, lovely red hair and
I want to emphasize those features. Then there is this kind of black blob here
and i'll talk about that in just a second. So let's do the skin tones and hair colour.
Now there's plenty of ways I could do this, but I'm going to jump over to the
HSL/grayscale. Now I want to find out what
Fearne's skin colour is, I'm guessing it's almost certainly orange,
it tends to be, but if you're not quite sure just grab the slider of
your choice
and throw it from one side to the other. And I mean really throw it around.
Do remember that raw is totally non destructive,
so you can move this all day long and it won't have any permanent lasting damage.
Now in this case I don't want to go crazy, I just want to brighten up the
skin tones by
taking away some of the saturation from the skin.
Obviously I could also change the luminance and the hugh if I needed to.
I also want to make the reds a little bit more poppy as well, so
let's make the red hair colour a little bit brighter
by increasing the saturation on the reds. Now the end result shouldn't be
enormous, it should be
a subtle shift, but a shift nonetheless. Right I'm happy with that, let's come
out of Raw and into Photoshop. So what is that mystery black blob?
Well it's actually my soft box, because when you're shooting in a small home
studio
you don't have the luxury of space where you can push things right to the edges, your
your always dealing with a small space and some other restrictions
that gives you. In the case of things like soft boxes and lighting, occasionally
you'll find the light stands might creep in or
the corner of a soft box might get in the shot because you're looking for that
slightly wider view.
That's where Photoshop can really come in handy and allow you just to make your small
studio
feel a little bit bigger. Let's have a look. So to remove this
I could use any of Photoshop's many tools
but the one I'm going to use is hidden away underneath the spot healing tool
and it's called the patch tool. It's a great tool for patching large areas such as
this in the corner here. All I need to do is draw a rough and I do mean
loose
selection around the object you want to remove
and then you can just drag that and you can see that I got a preview and that's why I
like this patch tool because you can try and match up
the colors and textures to whatever you want.
And I reckon about there looks good so we'll patch it there.
Now i'm just going to hide the marching ants, so i'll just press Control
H or command H and you can see that's a pretty good match although it does look
a little bit
light in this corner. Well now I can use the new features of Photoshop CC 2014
and I can just change my colour settings here, I can increase my colour settings
and ask it to think again about that area and maybe patch it a little bit differently.
That looks pretty good, but it is lacking a bit of texture, it needs a bit more texture in
there
and that's where the structure slider comes in, and I can just add a bit more
structure in there and again it'll have a little think about that
and it'll put a bit more structure in like so. Ok, so
let's get rid of the marching ants, because we don't need those
anymore. So there we go, there is my final picture, all patched and all colour
corrected
and all done in just a few minutes. Now if you have enjoyed this video and you want to see more
videos from myself
and the other amazing presenters here on Adorama TV,
you know what you've got to do. You've got to be clicking on the subscribe button.
I'm Gavin Hoey. Thanks for watching.
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