In this video I'll show you how a simple
sequined dress can become a super
sparkly background.
Hello I'm Gavin Hoey
and you're watching AdoramaTV
brought to you by Adorama,
the camera store that's got everything
for us photographers.
So recently I was having a bit of a clear-out
in the studio and I came
across this rather nice piece
of sequined fabric
and then I remembered
why I wanted to get rid of it
because the last time I tried to use it,
it was a real problem to light.
The sequins just bounced like absolutely everywhere.
There was hot spots and sparkles
all over the place
but then I thought don't ignore
the problem, embrace the problem.
Embrace the sparkly effect
by turning this into a dress somehow.
I can bounce light off the sequins
and create an amazing
sparkly background
but the first thing I need to do
is to work out what sort of light
will create the look I'm going for,
so let's get a model in,
let's get some light set,
let's get shooting.
So it's great to have Beth
back in the studio
Beth going to be the model for this shoot
and as you can see she's fully decked
out in very sparkly attire.
Now before we set up the main lights
and take some pictures of Beth,
what sort of light do I need
and really basic do I need a big
light source or a small light source?
Well remember we're going to embrace the sparkle.
I want lots of sparkle to be seen
not necessarily by the cameras but
reflected onto the background.
Now I could use small or big light sources
and before we set them up
I've got some easy ones to test with,
so I've got my small torch
and it's slightly bigger Rota light LED.
Let's start with the small torch first.
If I shine the small torch onto Beth
hopefully you can see that
on the background we have some lovely
sparkles bouncing off the little tiny
mirrors that are the sequins
and giving us that fantastic sparkly background.
That works really well,
so that's a small light source
so surely a big light
source will be even better?
Well let's find out,
let's get the Neo2 from Rotorlight,
turn that on
and we'll pop it in the same place
and it doesn't really do the same job.
Now it's got nothing to do
with the light manufacturer,
it's got everything to do
with the spread of the light source
so small light lots of sparkles,
bigger lights, less sparkles
and we're going to use both of these
as we embrace the sparkly aspect of this shoot,
so let's get some bigger lights set up.
Let's get shooting.
So I'm going to try
several different light setups
to get a variety of effects.
The first one I'm going to do
is just your standard key light
at 45 degrees, elevated in the air
with a nice sized softbox.
Now this should put some great light
on Beth but I've got a grid on the softbox
and that should help
to direct the light this way
and keep it off the background.
Now to see the sparkles
I need a dark background
which is why we have this mid gray here,
so with just this simple light set up
I should get a nice dark background but no
sparkles that's the theory. Let's try it
and find out.
Okay Beth here we go,
and as you can see that looks great,
light on Beth
but it looks really dark
in the background
so theory works,
so how am I going to get any sparkles
on the background?
Well for this to work
you have to think about the direction of light
so if I light Beth from the front
with a small light source
all the sparkles are going to
go out the front.
They just bounce off in the opposite direction
to the light so
if I want sparkles on my background
I have to light Beth from behind
so I've got a second eVolv 200
and I've got it in a snoot.
Now the snoot should give us
that small point of light
which I can pop in behind Beth
pointing at her back.
Now the back of her dress is covered
in the same sparkles
as the front of the dress.
That should work really well
but what power do I need that on?
Well there's no good metering it
because you've got a trial-and-error this to see
what works, so I've started somewhere
in the middle 1/16 power
let's take a picture like this
see how it looks,
okay Beth here we go.
So looking at the pictures,
they look basically the same
so either one of two things happened.
Either my theory doesn't work
or there's just not enough light
out of that backlight
to see anything. That's what I'm hoping
because we're only on 1/16 power let's
add two more stops to the light
let's go up to 1/8,
then 1/4 that's two more stops
of light, let's see if we see anything now?
Here we go,
and again,
and last one,
and yes we do.
There is the hint of something happening
back there, which means
the brighter I make this background light,
the brighter the sparkles are going to be,
pretty simple when you think about it.
So let's pop it on to full power.
Let's go all about 1/1 full power
and have a look at this.
That looks incredible.
Those sparkles really are there.
They look fantastic
and as Beth moves
every shot is slightly different.
That's one of the joys of this technique.
So that looks really good
and it works but do you need
a big soft box?
Well I said the size of the light
will have an impact on the shot
so let's see what happens
if we change this softbox
for something a little smaller?
So I changed the softbox
for a small reflector
and inside of that is a honeycomb grid
but not just any honeycomb grid,
it's a really tight 10 degree grid
that should mean that the light that comes out
is going to be very small
and should just hit Beth in the face
which means the rest of her dress
whilst it won't be black
it will be darker.
Let's see how this looks?
I've already metered this out it's f/2.8
still nothing's changed
from the last time
but the light is dramatically
different with that lovely tight beam of light.
So that looks really good and works
really well and it's a simple two light
setup but what if you had a third
light with another snoot?
Well let's set that up and see how that looks?
So what I've got is a third light
with a second snoot
and I only have really
a couple of snoots
so it's not a matching snoot.
This is a magmod snoot
but the effect is going to be exactly
the same. It doesn't matter on the light modifier
the light modifiers work whatever brand
you have, so the idea is I'm going to
shine these at the same angle
more or less onto the back of Beth
but avoiding getting any spill
onto the paper background
because we'll lose the effect,
remember right at the beginning
when we had the LED lights,
if we got spill onto the background,
we lost the glittery effect.
So that's the idea
they are both on their maximum power,
the light above Beth is on its minimum power.
Let's take a shot like this
and see how it looks?
Now when we do that we can see
it works really well with the sparkles
that looks fantastic
but when Beth has her hands down
she has a hand in the light
and because those lights are on maximum power
it kind of looks a little bit weird,
so we have to be a little bit
more careful with the posing
and say to Beth,
Beth you can pop your hands
behind your back,
you can have them up in the air
but not by your sides.
Okay, so that's the idea
and let's take a few
pictures like this and see how it looks
So that looks absolutely fantastic
but of course the pictures always need a bit
of post-processing so let's get one
of these pictures into Photoshop,
I'm going to do that right now.
The few enhancements I need to make
to the images are down to two things.
It was the styling that I used
and a light that was in the shot
so let's have a look at one of the pictures
and see what I do.
So this is the image I want to edit
and if you have a really close look
at Beth's headdress here,
you can see how it was made,
it is bamboo skewers hot
glued onto a child's headband
and the result well maybe I went a little bit
over the top with the hot glue because
there's a few areas where it's gone a
little bit too much and I ran out
of silver paint, I really did
so there are some areas here which shouldn't really
be there and so on now I could spend
longer fine-tuning that but there's
another area I want to do here which is
Beth's, well what you call a bracelet
and necklace,
well they're held together
by some double-sided tape.
They were literally just things we had lying
around the studio.
They need to be removed
because they look wrong
so I'll get the healing brush tool
and I'll sample by holding the Alt key
or the option key on a Mac
an undamaged area
and then we'll just paint that over the bit
where we can see the tape.
There we are and just doing it roughly
for speed but the end result is pretty good.
Now it comes down to speed and result,
the more time you put into cloning anything,
the better the results will be.
That looks fine but there's another problem,
I need to deal with
which is down to the lighting,
so the lighting of this image
caused an interesting side effect,
when you have a very strong backlight
you will see a lot more stray hairs than you
would see normally
and that's perfectly normal.
I was expecting it, I was ready
for it but yes there are lots
of really bright backlit stray hairs
which all need to be cloned out
if we want this clean look
that I'm going for.
Time again isn't what we have here
because you really don't want to sit
here and watch me clone
and there's another area to deal with
which is down here. Now here you can see
this weird pattern of dust
and this is exactly what it is,
it is speckles of dust
in the atmosphere. Again because of the extreme
strength of the backlight
any kind of dust particles
that are in the the same focal plane
as Beth I got a really glow and show in
the shot. Now I don't mind a few of them
I'm going to take away some of the brighter
ones in fact if you want to get creative
I've got a whole video on how you can
use dust in the atmosphere
to create some really dynamic portraits
on the Adorama Learning Centre,
so that's fine but there's another thing
I wanted to do
and that was the color in the picture.
I need to enhance that
and to do that I'm going to go into Camera Raw
or Lightroom,
so from here I'm going to go to filter
and choose Camera Raw filter.
Now if you started with RAW files
or Lightroom you could do this first.
There's no set order to doing any of
this but what I wanted to do
is have a nice bluish feel to the image,
so I'll take the temperature
and move it towards the blue end of the shot,
like so and to really enhance the colors
let's come down to the vibrance
and increase the vibrance as well.
Now that gives me that sort of blue Coldfield
that I was after
but it's had a bit of a nasty effect
on Beth's arms which have gone a little
bit more well it's called a magenta
I guess. Now we could try and just work on
the arms or I can take the tint
which has magenta and green
and move it away from magenta.
As I move it into the green
that helps to balance up the colors
of the skin. They're not correct
but they just feel better
and I prefer that cyan
color in the background.
Speaking of the background
the very last thing I need to do here
is just to get the local adjustment brush,
make sure my clarity is all the way up to +100
and paint on the background
because the entire purpose of this shoot
was to see the sparkles
on the background.
So I'll enhance those to their maximum
by increasing the clarity
which just adds a bit more contrast to the scene
and with a bit more tidying up,
there it is my final sparkly sequined shot is completed.
So it turns out it wasn't the fabric
that was the problem,
it was me!
Having an idea of what I can
actually do with this stuff.
Now if you've enjoyed this video,
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I'm Gavin Hoey,
thanks for watching.