In this video to I use a softbox to create a retro-style
image in a small home studio. Adorama TV presents
Take and Make Great Photography with Gavin Hoey
where you'll learn how to take stunning photos and then polish them and in
post-production
Hello I'm Gavin Hoey and your watching Adorama TV brought to you by Adorama
the camera store have everything us photographers and today I'm back inside
my small studio
to do a shoot using a softbox now in my last video
you saw me use this thing the umbrella and it's a question the crops
up a lot
should I use an umbrella or a softbox
well let me start by saying my opinion it not one
all the other they both have their uses thing I love about umbrellas
if you use them as a shoot through umbrella you get beautiful
soft lighting if you use them as a reflective umbrella
you can control the lighting much better and give it more direction
thing is I can do both of those with one softbox
that's why I love using it in studio's particularly small one
like this. Now you'll notice I've been busy with the paint brush I've done a little bit of
a paint job temporary on the wall so lets set up our shoot
and take some pictures
so I've set up my light and just to give you an idea of what it is this is the Westcott
apollo orb softbox hidden inside
is my flashpoint streaklight
360 from Adorama and that's what we're gonna use its a bear bulb light
which means I bounce the light around beautifully inside the softbox
creates soft but dramatic lighting so of corse we need a model
and I'm gonna bring in Freya. Freya do you want to come back here so you might
remember Freya she was in episode one of our
small home studio mini-series and as you can see she's got
a different look were gonna go for a nice kinda retro vintage look
but a few retro ideas to try out in a minute but first
I need to set the lights now one of the great things about softboxes is there
direction
of light you can use so lets try a couple different directions and see what look
we get
let's start by putting a light pretty close to the background
something like that now I'm going for a target
aperture of F11 just to give me that the depth of field I'm
after in this picture I've no idea what is going to be at the moment so I got a
light meter
and we'll take a test meter reading I'm getting
F14 and one the nice things about using the streaklight
is I can change the power here on the little remote
rather than diving into the soft box so if I want F11 that's two-thirds of a stop
less
just two clicks try again
11 perfect okay
so I got my F11 aperture lets take a shot and see how it looks
and as we can see what we end up with is a picture that's pretty contrasty
the direction of light is strong gotta lotta texture on the background
but the lighting on Freya it's a bit harsh its bright on one side
very dark the other so lets see if we can get this light bit
softer and a bit more even and the easiest way to do that of course is to move
the position at the light so it's not
at an angle but it's almost shooting straight
towards Freya just like that so from this angle we're gonna get a very different
look
but of course moving the light means I might have changed
the exposure. Exposure will change when the distance between the subject and the
light
alters I think has slightly let's just take a test reading
So yeah I'm getting f8 so I need another stop of light
that's three presses okay and we'll go
to f11 back to f11 again perfect
okay let's take a shot.
so this time what we've got is really
really flat lighting it actually works quite well for this picture but
it lacks a little bit of drama at the other shot
what I want is of course something in between
not flat not quite so contrasty how do I get that
I'll put the light somewhere in the middle ok so not straight on
not so angular there we go probably around about there that looks
pretty good again I've moved the lights
lets take other meter reading F14 so I can just drop this down two-thirds
of a stop
take the same to shop just to be sure
back to f11 again okay
and here we go. Yup they're we go so that gives me a nice amount of contrast
and a little bit of a shadow behind Freya and I actually quite like that shadow
I reckon we can do something with that in Photoshop so thats the light set
let's get a few props in and start doing the shoot
So there we go we got some great little shots there with our kinda retro v
vintage theme shoot and our
vintage cameras Freya's done a fantastic job
but what I need to do now is to get the best picture into Photoshop
and we're gonna do some editing and we'll do that right now
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so before I jump into Photoshop this is
a video thats a little bit interactive because if you have a go at reproducing
the photography bit
or Photoshop bit or both we wanna see the results
take them over to the Adorama Facebook page
upload them there and let's see what you can do with the ideas
from this video. I'll pop over swell and add some comments so
so let's jump into Photoshop now I shoot everything in raw so we could do this
in Lightroom we could do it in Photoshop
I'm using Photoshop CC and really what I want to do is to give this picture a
feeling
of age of being slightly retro and just a few little tweaks will give that look
now part of it comes down to the photography with this nice warm color
background
in the clothing and the styling and so on , a part of it
in the post-processing now the first thing I'm gonna change is the clarity
and if you know me you'll know I love increasing clarity for that contrasty
look
but not for this picture this picture I want a dreamy softness
now I could take the clarity down quite low but that's maybe
a little bit too far I'm actually gonna bring it down to about -30
give or take something like now to add to that glowing
affect I'm gonna do a couple tricks and the all revolve around the highlights
and brightness of the picture
so I'll take the exposure and increase it by about
half a stop thereabouts and I'm gonna take the
highlights and I'll just push them a little bit brighter and I'll take the whites
and do the same there as well
and that's probably just a little bit too bright just a bit burnt out
but that's exactly that retro feeling affect that I want to achieve
now remember I was talking about the shadow in the photography part of things
and
we played around with different positions at the light to get different
shadow looks
well if I had two lights I could deal with the shadows
in camera but we're gonna do that in a later video
so for now to deal with the shadows I wanna come over to the shadow slider
I'm just going to increase it so I slightly brighten the shadows
like so colors in this picture are lovely
love these sort of warmish tones I'm actually gonna take the warm
tone slightly further by increasing the temperature just a little bit
that add a nice creamy feel to the picture and to really make sure that
comes over nicely
I'm gonna change the vibrants, I'm actually gonna decrease it a little bit
vibrants I normally use to punch colors up but you can also use it to mute
colors down depending on how low you put your slider
you get a very different look in this case I probably wanna be sort of
mid-thirties
something like that so that gives my
my picture the nice kinda retro feel that I was after
but there's one part of the picture I still need to work on and that's the legs because
with the single smallish softbox the legs are a little bit darker
than the face which is a course where we metered for so to do with that area
I'm gonna get the zoom tool and we'll go a little bit closer a the legs
and I'm going to use the adjustment brush
and with the adjustment brush what I'm gonna do is I'm going to increase the exposure and it'll be
on the legs
maybe half a stop and also I'll bring up the shadows so we
open them up and also pull down the saturate ion so they don't become
too colorful I'm also gonna come down to the bottom here and
turn on auto mask and this is a bit of an old one cuz normally I would have
that switched off because it does some
some weird stuff as we'll see but in this case I need to just affect the legs
and if I have auto mask turned on I can put my brush
outside the legs and the effect is
I would say not happening but it's reducing the effect let's put it that way
and we'll deal with the the aftermath a second because you can see the
the down side of auto mask is its speckling effect
so to deal with that I'm gonna jump to the erase option
I'll turn off auto mask using a nice small brush for the nice
harder edge and bring that size down a little bit
I'm just gonna erase that back to the original picture
like so the more time you spend here the neater this will be
but for now we're just gonna do it reasonably quickly something like that
and that should just give me a nice soft finish
but lighten those legs a little bit , and we can even
possibly just push the exposure up just a tiny little bit more
pull-down the saturation there we get so let's get onto the screen
there we are so have a look at these two pictures side by side
the picture that I shot straight out of the camera is pretty good but my
editing just gives it that nice vintage retro feel
and that's the final picture completed
so the only thing left for me to do now is just a give my background a
a fresh coat of paint for the next video speaking of which
if you want to see more videos from myself and the other amazing presenters
here on Adorama TV know what you gonna do
click on the subscribe button I'm Gavin Hoey
thanks for watching
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