How to Use Window Light as a Beauty Light

Hi, everybody. This is Craig Tanner for the Mindful Eye and the Daily Critique. Today’s image was submitted by Michael who is an intermediate photographer from Chicago. Michael says that he was in a café with a friend of his and saw this beautiful window light and he took some candid shots and then started to give his friend a little bit more direction here and he ended up liking the images where there is more direction. He said that he shot with the Nikon D300, effective focal length of around 15mm and the ISO 800 exposed the file for F4 at 1125th of a second, and under questions and comments Michael said that his main concern about these images is the background. He said that he questioned the green back here in the corner and also this area where this other person is sitting and even the chair.

So mainly, he’s just wondering about the background. Let’s get right into it. I love the quality of light here, Michael has a very beautiful portrait subject and we would call this if we were talking about sort of formal portraits here in using terms we could call this beauty lighting.

And beauty lighting is characterized by most of the time a large broad soft light source. That’s a little bit higher. The center of this is a little bit higher than the portrait subject so that you get sort of a feeling of even light with some drop shadows that are happening underneath some of the features or all of the features of the face. It really get a sense of that drop shadow here and you get a very powerful sense of a soft broad light everywhere else in the portrait subject.

The other thing that’s so beautiful about this quality of light is just what’s happening with the light in the eyes. You have this feeling of the broad soft light but when it comes to the eyes, the light seems to have a sparkle to it. You’ve got a really beautiful catch light there and a dynamite place in the eyes. So having a beautiful portrait subject with this type of lighting combined can work very, very well.

Somebody that has an overall beautiful face, beautiful features of the face having this quality of light where you want to see all the features of the face then having just a little bit of dimension with that high to low feeling of the light and also nice feeling of quantity of light and sparkle of light in the eyes. It’s really gorgeous from a lighting standpoint. So very well seen in terms of seeing this light and then using it to great advantage.

The gesture here to me really goes along with the beauty lighting, very soft gesture, head is lightly tilted, head is lightly turned, head is laying back a little bit, the rhythm of that with this person’s hair, the soft lines of hair framing the face, soft light, soft pose and then just the hand as really doing the same thing in terms of a gesture.

All of these is just working out beautifully and I agree with Michael that the background here is very challenged. One of the things that I think about almost right away when I look at this image is wouldn’t it be great if we could have more of the square image, more like this, but we actually have this in the corner here because if we go to square, now the ideal formal symmetry where we pen these two corners out with two sort of signs are sort of square objects in those corners. The shoulders are going to be very formal and symmetrical down here. Maybe we have a little bit of the chair and that rhymes the hand, have the portrait subject centered which works great in the square and we ought to take great advantage now of one of the major diagonals in the square which works really well because of formal symmetry. We end up with the feeling of two halves.

You know? Something I just want to say here real quick is that in the same way that I think about black and white being so much easier, I think about Shooting Square being so much easier on the photographer.

On centering, there’s something sort of natural fresh to do and when you’re shooting square, it’s congruent with the framing device. It just makes it easier to go out and just shoot in an off handed way. Much less challenging from design’s standpoint, it’s just something to think about if the subject matter seems to be really dense, you’re struggling with the background. You’re struggling with the layers of informations, and start to try and see in square and that could really help. So one of the really cool things about Adobe Photoshop CS4 is something called content aware scaling and that’s going to help us solve the problem in this image in a real simple way.

What we’re going to do is we’re going to the polygonal lasso and we’re going to make a rough selection around the portrait subject here. We’re going to do some scaling, but right now what we’re doing is we’re creating a selection where we’re going to protect the portrait subject from the scaling that we’re going to do and I don’t have to get rope specific with this very rough.

I'm going to go to select, save selection, and I'm just going to since we know that this person’s name is Christine, I'm going to name this Christine and hit OK. And then drop that selection. Let’s go ahead and copy the background for a second and pretend like we actually have a good workflow. That should have already been done, and then we’re going to edit, content aware scale.

When we do that, as part of our options up here, and have the option to choose or protect part of the image. And we’ve already made the selection of where we want to protect and we call that Christine so there it is right there, it shows up. And we’re going to choose that as the part that we want to protect from the scaling and now Photoshop is going to keep Christine from being scaled and we’re going to magically be able to push that painting right over into this pinned out corner right there. Just come right over to the shoulder, double click, and then we would need to comment and add a layer mask here, and do a little bit of work to clean the mask up. And I've already done that just to save some time so we can do this under 10 minutes, and then I would come in and I would crop up to right here.

And so let’s go to this file. We have already done that work and that’s what it looks like and on this layer, in addition to playing with the mask in between the two layers and simplifying that left hand side. I also came in and clone this out right here which was left behind, and I also did just a little bit of retouching on the face. And you can see that along the area of the chin, just very subtle, just a little bit of touch up in digital gardening there. When I get to here in this image, I still say well you know the background now is to me much more unified and I’ve simplified this, and made it a lot more about the main idea. But color is still an issue. I've got the green back there. What could I do?

Well, I could come in and I could make this more of a blue gray so that if I have blue gray here, blue gray here and pop the filling of sort of blue green eyes out but then I also have this overall color cast that’s happening from the tungsten light inside and the wood panel and the balanced light and all that. I just start to think, you know what there is a light going on the color here that’s presenting a challenge, why not just go to black and white.

Black and white so much of the time in portrait is so much more evocative and her face in terms of having a lighter coloring and then the eye liner that she’s wearing are making her eyes very dramatic, and it had been more dramatic in black and white. I go to channels. I throw this real quick and you know the green channel here is just almost by it self. It’s just almost stunning. Select all, have a copy, go back to RGB, go back to layers, paste that in there.

From here, I just do a little bit shaping. One of the things that is happening in this image is just because the hand is closer than the face. The hand is taking over a little bit in a perfect world and posing. We might get the hand under the chin and back even a little bit more. We can cut down on that now with the mode in Photoshop and I might give a little bit more shaping to the face and a little bit more of a dark right here in the corner up here to match this corner.

I’m just going to do all that work very quickly here, just sort of in a rough way to give you the idea, blank layer, soft light blending mode, black is my foreground color, and I want to go to 10% opacity on this brush and zero hardness on the brush. What I want to start to do is just shade. I want to say there is a shadow there, only shade that. There is a feeling of some shadow there.

Let me shade this part of the face. Let me come in and shade over here. Let me come in and go to the eyebrows a little bit here, a little bit on the forehead to cut down on the feeling of so much light up there. Let’s just create a little bit of a feeling of a movement, maybe shadow coming off of here. We have to sort of pay attention to direction of the light and I’m trying to do that, just looking at the shadows.

Let’s cut down on the hand here. Let’s make this shadows look bigger on the lower left hand side of the hand. Let’s come in and shade this middle part and let’s shade the back part and as we do that and create the feeling of a little bit more texture then we can cut down on the feeling of the hand. I might add a mask here and make that a little bit more subtle because when I start to add contrast in there in addition in darkening, it will actually make this part of the image come forth even more.

We can also if we really want to spend a lot of time on this image, we could come in and do a little bit of scaling work down in here but for today’s purposes we’re not going to do that. I’m just going to come in and create a little bit of a vignetting mask and create more symmetry from right to left in terms of darkness up there and you know, this image right now to me is just really working very, very well. This is the difference between the color and the black and white and then is the difference between where we started and where we ended up.

I love to hear your feedback about this critic, huge thank you to Michael for sharing this really outstanding portrait with us on the Mindful Eye’s Daily Critique.