Hi guys, I'm Karl Taylor. Today I'm going to show you how effective the lighting
modifier called a beauty dish is. It's one of my favorite lighting modifiers
and it has been for many years. I've used it on tons and tons of shoots over the
years I want to show you the beauty dish, this is a 70-centimeter independent
brand beauty dish. I actually prefer this 70 centimeter silver model to the actual
Broncolor one, so it's an independent one and I'm going to pit it today against an
80-centimeter textured silver umbrella and an 80-centimeter shiny silver
umbrella and I'm going to show you how effective the beauty dish is as an
economical light modifier. Now my favourite light modifier for beauty
shots is actually now the Para 133, a parabolic, true parabolic modifier but
this is a lot, lot more expensive so I think you'll see what great value the
beauty dish is from today's experiment. Thanks to Squarespace for sponsoring
this video. Use coupon code 'Karl' to get a 10% discount. Now the first thing we need
to look at with a beauty dish is how to use them properly. I get lots of
questions about the angle, the position. 45-degree angle to your model and
literally just a meter or just over a meter, meter and a half away from your
model. Make sure from your model's eye perspective that you see the center dark
part of the beauty dish blocking the light and then you see a sort of ring
light effect around the outside, that's imperative and get it to line up
directly with the model's head. The additional trick with the beauty dish is
to use a tri-reflector below to bounce some of that light back up into the shadows
but for the purpose of this exercise we're just going to compare the
modifiers. So that's the setup position for using a beauty dish correctly for
beauty shots, let's run some tests Now I've set the power at power 5 on the
pack and we're going to keep the power at power 5 for each modifier so you can
understand and see which modifier is actually the most
efficient at directing the light forwards towards your subject. So we're
shooting tethered into my software here and I'm at f-16, 100 ISO, let's take the
shot and let's take a look at the picture.
Correct exposure, now interesting to study here is the background as well
look at the luminosity level on the background, how even the background is,
where the light is concentrated. Let's zoom in we can see the beauty dish reflecting
in the eye, we can see the shadows under the nose, under the chin, the harder,
darker shadows under the jawline there and this is doing exactly what I would
expect for a beauty dish with a bit of fall-off down here. If you look down the
arm you can see how the light is starting to fall off. Right that's a
really nice light result for that single modifier. Let's swap it out now for the
shiny umbrella. Okay, that's the silver shiny umbrella it's in the same position
same angle and height as the beauty dish. Let's take the shot and let's compare.
Right now immediately we can see a difference in the two images. Exposure is
relatively similar to the beauty dish there's the umbrella and there's the
beauty dish but the lighting from the beauty dish is actually a lot more
beautiful. Here it's a lot more scrappy and a little bit harder looking
but in particular, you see the difference on the background, we have
multiple shadows and areas of shadow on the background because basically that
shiny umbrella is picking up specular highlights from the light shining into
it, from the flashlight shining into it and that specular highlight is
basically emanating out of there like several harder lights plus a little bit
of softer light. Let's zoom in on the features. So here we have the silver
umbrella, you can see the shadow under the chin, under the nose, doesn't look too
different from the beauty dish, notice the beauty dish looks a little bit clean
even though it was a silver umbrella the light does look somewhat warmer. Exposure
wise not too dissimilar to be honest. Interestingly what you'll see if I zoom
out a tiny bit is the difference in the catchlights on the hair so this is the
silver umbrella and that's the beauty dish. So we have a nicer general lighting
on the face and hair with the beauty dish, I would say we have better contrast
overall control in terms of the punch and clarity of the image with the beauty
dish compared to there with the umbrella but the key takeaway actually is the
background. There's the background with that silver shiny umbrella and there's
the background with the beauty dish and interestingly this is the same diameter
modifier so it's the same width modifier but a huge difference compared.
We're now going to go to the slightly frosted silver umbrella and that will be
closer to the beauty dish than this modifier.
Okay that's ready to shoot.
Now interestingly with that modifier we immediately notice a drop in exposure
compared to the beauty dish but notice the background is more even because the
texture within the silver umbrella, although it is a shiny silver, it has a
texture inside of this particular umbrella which is diffusing the light
more and taking away those harder shadows or those patches of shadows we
were getting with the shiny silver umbrella but compare the exposure value,
there's the beauty dish and there is the slightly sort of frosted silver umbrella.
So we're losing about, looks like half a stop of light from the frosted silver
umbrella because it's spreading and dispersing the light out in other
directions whereas the beauty dish is concentrating that light more to one
area. If we look at the beauty dish again the lighting on the fabric is much
better, much more sparkly, much more texture and then it's a little bit
flatter on the frosted umbrella. If we compare the fabric on the shiny silver
umbrella it looks relatively textured but it looks a little bit harsh. If we
jump to the beauty dish you can see the beauty dish isn't quite so harsh on the
fabric but still retains all of the strength of light on the upper body and
the punch in the upper body. Back to the sort of slightly frosted umbrella, a
little bit flatter, a little bit softer, not having quite the punch that I would
like for fashion or beauty shots, however that being said it is an extremely
economical choice of modifier if you're just starting out. So I'm going to
increase this light by half a stop just to compensate for the fact that it's
dispersing, diffusing the light more, just so we have a fair comparison. Take that
shot, that's half a stop brighter that gives
us a better comparison, there we go to the beauty dish. Now what you're seeing
is the exposure on the skin is almost the same on the face but the background
is a lot, lot lighter with the silver umbrella
by comparison but it's actually a fair result but if you look the contouring
under the cheekbones, let's zoom in, if we look at the contouring under the
cheekbones here with the slightly frosted silver umbrella and compare that
to the beauty dish, the beauty dish has a higher level of contrast. We still have a
tiny little bit of exposure disparity, let's take a measurement just to see. I'll
lock a measurement here, value of 205 compared to 197 so let's take a tenth
off of this pack, let's do that shot again and let's get them absolutely
matching, so we're looking for 197, we've got 196 there which is pretty much like
1/30th of an f-stop close, so we'll take that two there right now we'll get
the absolute best comparison between those two modifiers so we can see yes
the beauty dish has got much better contouring under the cheekbones compared
to the frosted silver modifier and if we zoom out on the shot a little bit
further to look at the whole body the beauty dish light is concentrating the
light much more to the upper body area where it should be
the other one is spreading more light around onto the background so we end up
with a brighter background and the light is more spread out over the whole body
whereas the beauty dish is really locking that contrast in to the upper
body on Stiffanie there. So I hope you enjoyed that quick comparison between
those modifiers, if you'd like to see a really detailed comparison of all types
of modifiers that's beauty dishes, soft boxes, Paras, umbrellas, ring flashes,
then head over to KarlTaylorEducation.com where I've got all of that over on
my platform. Thanks for watching. This video is brought to you by Squarespace.
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