In this video
I shoot a Film Noir style image
in my small home studio.
Hello I'm Gavin Hoey
and you're watching AdoramaTV
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the camera store that has got everything
for us photographers
and once again you join me
in my small home studio,
except today, this isn't a home studio.
This is a private detectives office.
I'm going to create
a Film Noir inspired shoot,
lots of contrast, monochromatic.
It should be a great fun thing to do.
So this is going
to be the office.
On the other side
is going to be,
well, the outside world
and I am going to treat them
and light them differently.
Now to separate
the two areas, I've got this,
which is just a cheap venetian blind
and it's going to do a few things.
It will add some separation.
It's also going to be a prop
and a light modifier as well.
So let's get some light set.
Let's get a model in.
Let's get shooting.
So today I've been joined in the studio
by Brian who's going to be
the private detective here
in my small home studio
and we got the basic setup already.
We've got the venetian blinds
and I've got a key light.
Mostly this light is going to be
the important part of the setup.
So let's get this right first.
So I've got an Evolve200
from Adorama here. It's shining
through the venetian blind
and you'll notice it's fairly low down in height.
That's going to give us a mood and drama
to the portraits that you wouldn't get
if the light was up high.
So this is already metered out for f/8.
Let's take a shot, see how this looks.
Well that's a good start
but we can make some improvements
and the easiest improvement I can make
is controlling the spread of the light,
and I can do that
by using something like this.
So this is a honeycomb grid
that's specifically for the Evolve 200
and my Streaklight 360
and this if I pop it
in the reflector,
it's going to give me some direction
of the light
So less light hits the white.
Light will still hit Brian,
but it will be less as well,
because that grid just takes away
some of the light.
Now to find out how much
I'm going to use a flash meter
and I'm just going to meter
from Brian now.
Brian's very kindly held the
the blinds open for me,
because I want to make sure
I'm metering through the blinds
and I'm not metering the actual shadow
from them. So I've lost
almost a stop there,
so let's just increase that
and we'll take another meter reading
and I'm back to f/8 okay?
So I'm back to the same meter reading
I was before,
let's take the shot see how that looks
and you can see straight away
the difference in mood
between this and the last.
The wall behind has gone
almost completely black.
There is still some detail
there on the left-hand side
and that looks much more dramatic,
but it's missing one really important thing.
There's no glass in the window,
so let's add that in now.
So I've added in the window.
Now this is an actually glass this is perspex
and you might have seen this before.
if you saw the video I did recently
where we did
a shoot through a rainy window.
This is exactly the same
piece of perspex.
If you missed that of course
go check out the Adorama Learning Center
for more information.
Now it's not going to change the exposure
on Brian so I don't need to re-meter
but it will change the look and feel.
Have a look at this.
Here we go.
So now on that left-hand side
you can see
that there's some reflection,
that there's some dirt and scratches
and decay, and that really adds to
the look and feel of this shoot.
So we could keep this
as a single light setup.
That does work really nicely
but if you've got access
to some more lights
you can really start to build this out
and make a whole new inside scene
to go with the outside world
and the first light I'm going to use
to do that
is this one.
This is going to be a separation light.
I'm going to put it
nice and high because I want any shadow
cast by this light to go down
onto the floor
rather than to go onto the blinds
and also well,
that's where the light
would be in a room.
It's likely to be up high.
I'm going to try and get it so it
just hits Brian's shoulder
and just illuminates this part
of the scene
and separates Bryan out
from that dark background.
Now it's another streak light
which means I can use
the remote control here
and control it,
which means I can choose the power
without having to go backwards
and forwards.
Let's take a shot like that
at its lowest power
and at it's lowest power
it works but it's not that impressive
I think you need to increase
the power
by a couple of stops.
So if I go up two stops in power
and do the same shot again.
Now we're getting some nice light
hitting the back of Brian's neck.
His shoulders and just separating him out
from that background.
Even a little bit on the hat as well,
which looks really good.
With the light on Brian's shoulder
it really needs a source,
where did it come from?
So that's what I'm going to do
with the third light.
So this light I'm going to put up
nice and high,
and it's going to beam down at an angle
and just put a little splash of light
onto this background.
It's called motivated light
rather than normal light
because I'm going to try
and make it look like it's coming from here
but in fact it's coming
from this light here.
So two lit different lights
to achieve
a single lighting look.
Now once again
it's on its own separate channel
so I can control this remotely
at the moment I've got it set to its lowest
possible power.
I think that's possibly about right.
We don't want to go up any brighter than that
and I think that's where
we're going to live with that.
Okay so that's my basic lighting setup.
I'm going to move around,
try out a few different props
and see if we can get some interesting
shots with this.
So Brian are you ready?
Yeah.
Okay let's take some pictures.
Well there we go that was absolutely wonderful.
Brian makes a fantastic detective
but to complete the look and feel of this,
we need to do a bit of Photoshop work
I'm going to do that right now.
For my Film Noir effect
it wasn't just the styling and the lighting
that was going to be important
I knew the post-processing would be too.
So I need an image that's black and white.
I also need lots of contrast to really fit in
with the theme of the shoot
and to do that
I'm going to use
either Lightroom or in this case
Photoshop's Camera Raw
Let's have a little look.
So this is the image I want to edit
and the first thing I'm going to do is take
the color image and make it black and white.
So I'm going to jump over to the HSL stroke
rescale here in Camera Raw
that's B&W in Lightroom
and then I'm going to click on the convert
to grayscale button right here
and that's going to make a basic black and white.
Now we'll come back and adjust that
in just a minute
but for now I'm going to go back to the basic tab
and apply some basic adjustments.
Now the key thing for Film Noir
is contrast, lots of contrast.
So let's get the contrast slider
and increase the contrast quite a lot.
That's pretty "contrasty",
but we can go even more with the contrast
by doing something like clarity.
Clarity is contrast enhancement
but in the mid-tones
and that looks really nice
on this style of image.
Now I'm not too happy
with what just happened on his face.
I've lost a bit of detail around the mouth.
So let's bring that back
by switching to the adjustment brush
and the adjustment brush allows me
to make a local rather than a global adjustment
in this case I want to increase
the exposure.
I probably want to open up
the shadows a little bit
and counter-intuitively
I want to add in some more clarity.
Clarity helps us to bring up the highlights
as well as opening up the shadows
with the other sliders.
So that works really nicely
I can use the same setting just a,
maybe put some little lights,
here and there,
just to highlight parts of the image
that may have got lost
in the overall processing.
Now I said earlier that we
would go back to the HSL grayscale
and there is a reason for that.
It really works well on the skin tones
if you adjust the tonal range
just for the skin.
So to do that I need to go to,
any of the tools on the left hand side
like the zoom tool for example
and then I can go back
and find my HSL stroke grayscale.
There it is and I'm going to come down
to the oranges.
Now the oranges slider is the one
that really affects most people's skin tones
and you can see how I move it around,
it affects anything orange in the picture.
So it will have an effect on the venetian blinds
which were sort of a yellowy,
browny orange color,
but more importantly it will affect blind skin tones
I can use that just to lighten up the skin tones
just a little bit from where they
were and just put a bit more detail in there,
something like that
and with a few other adjustments
and fine-tuning effects,
there it is my Film Noir styled image,
it's complete!
With just a few simple props
and some careful lighting
it's amazing how quickly you can turn
your small home studio
into a Film Noir inspired shoot.
Now of course if you've enjoyed this video
well leave me a comment below
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and the other amazing presenters
right here on AdoramaTV.
I'm Gavin Hoey.
Thanks for watching.