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Beauty Dish Lighting Demo Part 2

Lesson 18 from: Building and Using DIY Lighting Gear

Kevin Kubota

Beauty Dish Lighting Demo Part 2

Lesson 18 from: Building and Using DIY Lighting Gear

Kevin Kubota

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Lesson Info

18. Beauty Dish Lighting Demo Part 2

Lesson Info

Beauty Dish Lighting Demo Part 2

And I'm gonna switch lenses now and just to kind of tip in general about yes, you can relax like my back was to you. Uh, one of the tips I share, sometimes with wedding photography and kind of photographer you, if you're at an event and you're getting creatively stifled, or maybe you're shooting like this and you're shot enough it's switch to something completely different a coat, a lens rotation exercise where sam shooting with a telephoto and we're boom you're thinking of this is definitely a seventy two, two hundred shot, you know, you're shooting your family, your bride or whatever is you're shooting and you just kind of feeling like I've done this before, but you have how about take out a fish eye? You know? So what I do is I forced myself, grab something completely opposite, put that on there and then go through the same scene, the same setup, which looks great but tried different lens completely different than what you're on, that shakes your you're thinking up a little bit so t...

hat's. One of the reasons I like having some like a lens baby or something unusual, is it? When I've shot it the normal way? The first thing that came to mind was like a shallow depth of field eighty five one point four but then like okay, well I need to also try something else too so go for something completely different as well so don't don't give up on your first I thought what that lindsay wanted to use tractable options so this lenses ah edge eighty and the manual focus and I'm gonna shoot it at two point oh, which means I would have to drop this light just a wee little bit right a very different look and feel to the focus wherever got on ly one eye and focus on this year way low now try that again didn't compensate quite enough for that change in my lens and because this is a manual linds sometimes it's a little trial and error but super fun to play with them so what I've done with this lens here's tweak my plane of focus uh over towards the eyes so if you can see here in the camera um I've been the lens from straight to the side and I just shift my plane of focus over that way some kind of going that taking a slice right down through eyes so you can see you know the plane in focus goes through her eyes and her neck, but everything else just goes nicely out of focus that kind of plays with the normal planes of focus of a of ah shallow depth of field lindsey I'm gonna go up to third stop mohr and late one more time said daniel, can you scoot your whole body that way there's too little much too much gap beneath the next. Yeah, you should get your hair all squidgy moochie okay. Killing here's a little bit in the shot move. Not too bad here. Okay, good. Chin up. Just a touch more good blacks. All right, so now we're going we're just going to smooth the light just a little bit over so you can see the difference in the lighting pattern on her face. This is more of a direct a little slightly off center, but it's still fairly direct and now let's move it. Actually, so that were slightly on that side of her nose. Okay, it's still coming from above we turn your chin towards me and you ok, so I'm kidding moved back this way just little bit right there. Okay, good. Three, two, one. So as we move the light over to the side will start to cast shadows to the side of her face it's more split lighting on her which is stepping away from the the hurrell style hollywood lighting we need to lift her chin just a little bit of that, but we start to really slim her face for one and change the mood of it a lot from a vintage hollywood style may be a little more modern style because this type of shadows isn't is not a vintage hollywood, so it's not as easily recognizable, is that so we're going to do one more same kind of set up like the light pattern. What we're looking for is a little triangle of light under her left eye, which you see their little patch of light it's kind of like the modified rembrandt style lighting and then making sure we're getting a catch light and light into the eye, but also casting that that shadow from her nose across there. Okay, good change this way just a little bit towards me right there? Not quite that much. Can the caitlin, I think you need to go just a little bit there, okay? Ggo thiss blacks a lot of hair there looking ok, so what we're gonna do just going to build on that one more sting is to add a little bit of a hair light, and we'll take what we already have, which is down here toilet paper, and we'll add that on there any questions so far while a symbol, this last piece on here good let's, take a look, let's see a question from betty d is why is there less of a catch light in her right eye? Is that that angle of just the angle we have where the disk is so betting on how symmetrical you place the light and where how her face is angling you have mohr lesson when I heard the other and that's again personal thing if you want to adjust it so you have exactly the same like this one here what happened? It looks like there is a catch light but her eyelashes just she's their eyelashes kind of defusing that catch light so if she was the lift urchin quarter and she would have caught that too much the same catch light in that particular one but I can see right here her eyelash goes right through it so maybe it's she was partially blinking maybe I just could have lifted her chin a little bit more about that in there. All right, so let's take our toilet paper tubes zoot suits newt and shoot this on her cute hair it's on channel b no place this down here kind of back yeah does that look like it's pointing at her here there you are. All right, let's try are you going ash thiss this kind of right here? Okay, good. Ok zoot suits newt caitlyn you're back you have to be careful not stand for this newt and this note is set to manual power one thirty two you know it's gonna be good or not we'll test it all right so let's do that shit up just a little more towards me just a little bit you're beautiful see where I come in face life is beautiful of that shaping on her face I've seen a little of the snoot down the bottom right it needs to crank it up just a bit all right it's on channel b so you that two thirds mohr I think it's hitting her here looks like it is it's even get that same angle there love your dangle your face is just perfect ok turn your chin towards me just little more and shut up just a bit more good right there you know I got some little glow on her hair in the back and we'll do one more merson crank up a little more on that but we're so close right now people last shot attention towards me rule it and up just a little bit with the gene you can relax no I still got some texture in her hair beautiful light in the I was eyelashes so cool great shaping on her face on duh ready to move on I think so we can see what the lens baby what we're getting is their slice of focused typically if I focus on the eyes it was sort of start to go that way we'll have actually got my my plane and focuses here across so this eye which was focusing on primarily is boom right there fallen here's a plane to focus like that and then everything else starts to go but notice this is interesting too like you have focus here and there but not here because that's where that plane is it's kind of like that like a slice it makes it really interesting different perspective on things and the other end's babies that they have have ah where it's a circle of diffusion around the edge of the center point so well you focus on one point and then as circular lee it goes out of focus really quick and that's really cool but you could move that any place around the frame just by tweaking that around like that so fun tools to play with just to get yourselves thinking a little more creatively ok, so we're gonna do another shot here we're gonna add another tool in a minute but let's just pop into we need to detach this to go on the computer take us anywhere not well let's not and say we did just curious if I needed to touch the camera but I think we're okay so I'm gonna take these into light room which were already and we'll just do a little tweety on those play with these images were quick so let's take the state just take one of these images here and in the developed mode here in light room I will look at the presets and what I was originally thinking that this is a very black and white hollywood so I do have a preset let me just kind of find it that's ah, her relish it might look kind of cool. There we go. All right, so I applied the her relish black and white preset on this thing and I'm gonna tweet just a little bit is always fine tune it for the particular image for her skin tone and everything and I'm gonna take my exposure down just a wee little bit. Ok? And one of the things that with hollywood portrait is they always just completely retouch smooth the skin and all that and she's got just great looking skin already, but I want to just add a little bit of a sassy softening on that. So after applying her relishing the hellish preset already has some softening built into you could tell it has sort of a hollywood glow to the whole thing, but I'm gonna also take down my highlights just a little bit. Okay, so they don't have too much a bolo out in there, but a little bit towards the edge of blow it is actually good that's what I do want and I'll play with my whites to see there exactly where I want them to be, they're all there and then take my favorite brush k brush kevin's a adjustment brush and in there I've got one called skin powder on my presets here now take my skin powder and we'll go in and just kind of some buff this out a little bit thanks again ah if I needed to do heavy retouching is she had skin issues that I need to really re touch that private a photo shopped for that but as it is we don't I'm just buffing that out little bit my skin powder sassy, ok one other thing I will do is to take a new adjustment here read the top right make a new adjustment and do digital fill flash zuman not quite that much and I'm going to do a little bit of you dad in her eye and this is kind of a nice trick if they have, um some tone in their eye on this one it's like really dark, dark, dark brown eyes even that it works but I want to bring out a little more of that texture in the ice so I'll size my brush just about the size of her people with my digital fill flash with the flow down low twenty twenty one or so you don't want to go too low but you know and well dad it a few times and that's just to make the eyes kind of come alive a little bit all right, so if I turn that often on kind of just see what we've done there, okay? Twinkle the eyes a little bit. Um, generally, if she didn't have this beautiful eyelash job done here, I would take my eyeliner tool, create new in my k brush section, click on new again and there's one called eye liner, and the eyeliner tool is designed to dark in things that are already somewhat dark, so would go right over eyelashes and things under her eyes. But we do have such a great job with the make up the way it is, we don't really need to do that, okay? And, um, what else can we do? That looks pretty cute, kevin. We have a question in the audience. Those presets, are they yours? Or are they already in light room? These are mine, and I'm using these ones that have created I showed you some of them. I'll show you a couple of how to make a couple of these that I use all the time, like the eyeliner and the digital feel flash pretty simple, but I'll show you how to make those stick the presets, too, so pretty close to what I want here that they have seen, one more thing I want to do is to I'm gonna burn down this part of the couch in this park just a little bit case to bring just kind of distracts from what I want to be the brightest is just right here on her face, so I want to take this down a little bit that down a little bit k brush my favorite tool, and then I'll hit new again. Each time you create a new adjustment, you want to hit new to make sure that you're not actually adjusting one that you already made. Okay, so click new, and this time I'm gonna use smokeless burn and take my brush tool flow down low, and I had a dad just a little bit and actually bring the flow a little lower, so it's acts slower, probably pretty good, so that pretty much you know, I might spend a little more time going in close and doing a little retouching there's one we don't really need it at her because it's not not necessary, but I'll just show you a little retouching trick when you have lines under the eyes, which, generally we have to fix always have to fix my own photos. When headlines america, I'm always like so one of the good tools for doing that in light room is to use your selective adjustment brush it's our views, your healing brush for this one and the key here is that because we can now, in the newest version of light room, we can draw lines with our healing. We can actually draw a line across something and and patch that is then to do that, and then to fade it with the opacity slider here, all right, so that it blends natural. So we said it one hundred percent and I'll set my brush fairly low like this and just draw a line along the line under her eye and you'll notice that light room will automatically pick a spot and ninety percent of time. It's a bad spot, it just doesn't work when you do this and it just takes these random spots. What you do is you press the h for ho, ho, ho h and that will that you hide and show your selection area and you click and drag where it's sampling from and put it on her nose like that. No, you put out her cheek or somewhere that has similar tone and to where the area working on and this one I could use a little bit extra on the edge here, go down there, take that out and that's going, of course, picked the wrong spot as always, I'll drag it over there. Okay, so the reason you did the opacity so once you pay pasted it almost looks fake that we took way too much so take my capacity slider here on the top right and we can sort of blended back so so as they go back and forth you can see now that particular corner there weaken blend it and I'll select the original patch take the capacity and play with that and blended so there's there's the original and we can take away as much as we want so I'm just gonna lighten it a little bit like that stays natural um she doesn't really have big bags and arise so there's no need to do much more okay and then we're good ok any questions so far? I do have a quick question with regard to this image that you just made if you don't have these presets what were some of the main things they jack's right? I was just going to do that so let's just look at that so one of the first thing we did was make it black and white so let me only dissect this black and white for you so you could see how we made it so I'll scroll over to the right, hide my selective adjustments and go right to the basic adjustments so what I did was I popped the contrast up looking right over here is what we're pointing to and this is something that you can set by the numbers or you can you want experiment? Probably you don't want to go too much higher than about fifty it's real contrast e okay and I also bumped my shadows up now the highlights these things are something I did afterwards based on the image is not something you want is part of the pre set is that this is the general settings for making the presets so bumped a contrast up the shadows up a bit because once you have that contrast to the lose shadow details of fine it's kind of cool that you can actually pull their more shadow detail back to get that hollywood glow I'm taking my clarity in the presence panel this is not like christmas and hanukkah presents this is the presence that she has, so we're dropping the clarity downs on this case and using minus seventy three point two six nine pi r squared approximately so we're going to set that at okay on get that's something that you can play with and figure out you know, maybe I'll have some preset there's just a little bit less some a little mohr somewhere because that makes it softer, less off depending on the subject matter ok, take a peek at my tone curve I've said it to just the strong contrast tone curve, which is me a nice big assess and if you like my big s then let's move on down and go to the black and white mix and it's very similar to the mix we had yesterday they showed you guys were ad member that I had the warmth to the shadows and I use this in a lot of my presets because I just love that richness that it gives specially print print this on a actually color paper, which most digital printers do you do get a black and white with a with a depth to it it's different than a straight cold black and white so you might want to do some testing, but here is the black and white mix basic idea mean bumping the red orange yellow up a little bit mostly red and orange little bit of yellow and that will get the skin tones be brightened very painting look screwing on down here split toning again when we talked about this yesterday, that little secret formula to add the split toning we're adding some chocolate a little bit of warm chocolate on lee to the shadows by pushing the balance up here. Hugh, if you want to just copy these settings is forty two the saturation twenty four and that puts a beautiful chocolate into the shadows. I do see something else I want to do do it quick, but we'll do that in a safe on then the last thing I believe on here is going to be the post crops and getting I've added about minus twenty points of vignette ng to the edges because that's just but you got to do with the hollywood portrait bring down this vignette and that's something in the mortgage a matic we want to make it we could bring it in tighter and that's pretty cool too but I want to see a little bit of detail around the edges there ok? And once you have all those settings you goto presets click on plus give it a name of some sort make sure you save what you adjusted which was contrasts shadows what else do we change? Guys and girl tone curve clarity what else? But black and white split toning post crop vignette, right? We got split tony in there and that was pretty much it for the tones that made this adjustment and create. Now we have that we can reuse on another image. Ok, any other questions on that now? That's great. Are we going tio make the next we're gonna make the item next item yes, and before that for people who are just joining us, could you just show us again? This whole section was on that beauty dish? Can you just unwrap it again and yes, the nation summary of what we made yeah I think the beauty is too is if you think about the concept again the idea that why we're teaching this issue you think about what do you creating you're creating a controlled similar smallish light source right that's soft but it also will spread and full out like we saw here it puts the hot spot on her face and then it gradually fades away that's kind of look for if I used a big soft box what would have what would it look like he just sent me I would have more of an overall even light across her which would be ok but not definitely not the style we're looking for here rights that's what we go with a smaller light source now one of the things you can do to you could take something that you know it's a bigger surface area this is the lunar group we talked about yesterday but if I put my flash in here and zoom the head so that it's tight or maybe put the flash with a snoot onto this we could achieve pretty much the same look for my students but the flash of this new so that the snow is basically illuminating just right here and I got a similar to that where it's going to be hot spot and then a gradual soft paid off so this this could be very versatile that you could create this very tight, controlled light or zoom it out and create a very broad light. So this is the lunar group we talked about yesterday, west got on my new product because we should check that out. But I think I like this in this reason I create this because it does give me that versatility to cover several of the different lighting styles and one and this is what we created, and we basically strapped it to the head. Uh, this is just like a shower cap that we sowed from elastic and effusion fabric on there's the inside nothing inside noto no diffusers or anything and that's something you could experiment with. Some people have double diffusion, which makes us more like a soft box, like a mini soft box. If you put you could buy a tape it halfway and picked a piece of diffusion on and put this over the front have double diffusion that makes it super soft. That's nice too, but I don't I don't find necessary find be pretty nice and soft the way it is and still directional, right? So I use this without this, I'd have the shadow lines. It would be very hard black lines rather than these gradual lines and that's what using a soft source does, ok?

Class Materials

bonus material with purchase

Kevin Kubota -- DIY Lighting Tools Manual.pdf

bonus material with enrollment

Kevin Kubota - Special Offers.pdf

Ratings and Reviews

Geo Montecillo
 

Super good course highly recommended it will help you get started on a low budget, yet creating wonderful images. Is there a link to west got?

F8 and be there
 

This was an awesome fun class! So many great ideas on how to achieve various lighting effects on a smaller budget. You will save the price of the course most likely by making one softbox (or whatever) yourself. Highly recommended!

Adrian Martinez
 

Going into my 4th year of photography, I finally built a photo studio in my home and after purchasing some lighting gear and other accessories, I decided to buy this course for additional ideas - GREAT class! I learned a LOT and was very inspired to be more creative. I especially liked that Kevin didn't joke too much or stray away from the course very much at all. Yet, he was still very entertaining and very informative. I'm putting so much of what I got form this class into action right away! This course DEFINITELY pays for itself - right away!

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