There are two main schools of thought when it comes to lighting. One is to light your subject in a way that is not grounded in reality but merely looks cool. And the other is to use lighting to translate the way your eye sees light into a way that your camera can better understand it.
That latter choice is the option we'll be exploring today in a walk-through of a sunset portrait of artist Wendy Ng for the Howard County Conservancy.
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Photoshop’s Content Aware Fill tool seems fairly straightforward, but a recent tutorial shared by Adobe shows a clever little trick that could result in more accurate edits.
Shared on its Photoshop YouTube channel, the one-minute tutorial shows how changing the default ‘Color Adaptation’ setting within the Content Aware Fill workspace can result much more accurate fills working with images with gradients in them.
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As Adobe’s Meredith Stotznere explains, this setting controls the brightness and contrast of the filled area to better match the surroundings when the default setting is too rough an edit. By default, the setting is on, but not at its highest strength. To improve the feature, Photoshop offers a ‘High’ and ‘Very High’ setting for smoother transitions, as well as an ‘None’ setting for when you’re working with hard edges with overlapping colors.
It’s a small change, but could result in much more pleasing edits when you need to remove objects from an image. You can find more 60-second tutorials on the Photoshop Magic Minute playlist.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
The post Getting to Grips with Fill Light in Portrait Photography appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by John McIntire.
Using fill light is an essential skill that will allow you complete control over the contrast and tonality in your images in any type of lighting situation.
It should be no secret to any photographer that one light is all you need to achieve great results. While one light setups (in this context, specifically those that don’t involve the use of a reflector) are both well discussed and incredibly useful, sometimes it’s good (or even essential) to go beyond the basics. The next step in your progression is probably going to be to add fill lighting.
Fill light is one of those essential skills that every photographer should have a good grasp of no matter what type of light they are using.
One light setups are powerful, and the results can be great. However, sometimes it’s useful to be able to take even more control over the contrast in your images.
This article will help to get you started with two types of fill lighting. The first of these is the use of the humble reflector. The other is to use a second dedicated light source. Both of these methods are very different in how they are implemented and what they can achieve. Mastering both will give you a more complete skill set with which to use in your photography.
In the image on the left, the lack of fill lighting has left most of the details in the back of the subject’s dress as pure black. Adding fill light (right) has brought those details back.
The concept of fill lighting is quite simple.
The idea is that you use it to light the shadows in your frame. What this does is:
While really dark and contrasty images definitely have their place (I love them myself), images (especially portraits for clients) will benefit from a more even contrast ratio. I once heard it described (I’m sorry, I don’t remember where) that in lighting for TV and cinema, the shadows are always lit. This was a lightbulb moment for me as I had always wondered how cinematographers seemed to show a lot detail while still retaining a good amount of contrast. The answer was controlled fill lighting.
Reflectors are a powerful and versatile tool that allows you to be as subtle or as bold as you like with your fill lighting.
The most basic type of fill lighting is that provided by the ever so basic, yet powerful, reflector. You probably have at least one of these already (or you’ve made a few). Reflectors provide fill light by reflecting light (go figure) from your key back into the shadows of your frame. In a lot of cases, reflectors will be your first foray into fill lighting. However, they will also be one of your most-used pieces of kit altogether.
Using a secondary light source as fill is going to be your most versatile option.
You can also use a second light (or third and beyond) as your fill light. A dedicated fill light will do the same basic job as a reflector, but it is infinitely more controllable. You can fine-tune the exposure and shape of your fill light with a precision that reflectors just don’t allow.
Left: The shadows are filled heavily and the fill light is metered one-stop below key. This results in a low contrast image with shadows retained. Right: the fill here is four stops below key. The contrast is high and the shadows are deep, but all of the detail is present.
The very concept of a contrast ratio can seem technical and daunting, I know. However, it is not at all that difficult of a concept and it’s just not that technical. At the most basic level, a contrast ratio simply tells you how bright one light is in relation to one another in terms of the aperture of your camera.
If your key light is metering at f/8, that means that if you set your camera to f/8 and an appropriate shutter speed (lower than your camera’s max sync speed) you will achieve a correct (subjective) exposure in-camera.
Fill lighting will always be underexposed in relation to your key light. If it’s even to your key light, you will get flat, no-contrast images as a result. For a contrast ratio that provides low contrast, you will want your fill light to be at least one stop darker than your key light. Since our hypothetical key light is f/8, that means the key light in this instance needs to meter f/5.6. This is a ratio of 2:1 (which is more advanced and you definitely don’t need to know to get started).
In short, if you want less contrast, your fill light should be one to two stops under your key light. If you want more contrast, try three to four stops.
If you want to be as precise as possible with these ratios, you will want to consider a light meter. That way you can measure any light falling on the scene with the press of a couple of buttons. This is the easiest way to go about it and works in the studio and natural light. You can also meter the light bouncing off a reflector.
A light meter is the easiest and most accurate way to read what your light is doing. However, they don’t tend to be cheap.
That does not at all mean that you have to use a light meter, though. While more difficult (especially if you’re new to lighting like this), you can do it with your histogram on the back of your camera. Take a test shot with just your key light on. Now take one with only your fill light on. (Note: you won’t be able to do this if you are using a reflector.) Because fill lighting should be raising the exposures on your shadows, the shadow area of the histogram of your fill light test shot should be further to the right than that of your key light test shot. If the shadow areas on both histograms line up, you need to increase the exposure of your fill light. If the shadow areas of your fill light’s histogram line up with the mid-tones or highlights of your key light’s histogram, you need to decrease the exposure of your fill light. (I did say it was trickier.)
Left: Without fill light, you can see the shadows are underexposed. Right: With subtle fill light, you can see the shadows are brought up quite a lot.
Of course, you don’t have to do either of these things. You can always eyeball the whole setup and try to adjust things on the go. I would say this is perfectly fine with experience, but as you start out, I encourage you to at least have a go with the previous methods. It will drastically reduce the amount of time it takes you to get to grips with the technique and fully understand what is going on with your light. The more you understand, the easier you will find it to adjust things on the fly. You will also be able to learn new techniques faster.
Reflectors can be subtle or bold when used as fill and are pretty versatile for what they are.
Reflectors are:
Reflectors are powerful, yet accessible, tools for fill lighting.
Before you start to think about fill, you will want to decide what your key light (main light source) is going to do. Set up your key light so that it is shaping and lighting your subject the way that you want. Meter so that you have the exposure settings that you desire.
A small(ish) softbox placed in front of and above the subject creates soft light with shadows underneath the subject’s features.
Now, evaluate the shadow areas that your key light is creating. If you’re using natural light, or strobes fitted with modeling lights, you can do this by eye. Alternatively, you can take a test shot and review it on the back of the camera.
Here you can see that while the light is soft, the shadows are a prominent part of the image.
Place your reflector so that it is roughly opposite your key light. Evaluate what the reflector is doing (either by eye or test shot again).
Adding a reflector beneath the key light serves to raise the exposure in the shadow areas of the image.
What you are aiming for is for you shadows to be brought up in exposure, but not eliminated altogether. If you want low contrast, bring your reflector in as close as possible. If you want more contrast, move it away.
With the reflector used as fill, the shadows are still present, but the overall contrast in the image has been reduced.
It can take quite a lot of practice before you learn to see the subtle changes a white reflector provides. The key is to get as much practice in as possible.
Set up an object and light it. Put your reflector wherever you want and start taking shots, being sure to move the reflector into different positions each time. Review each shot and try to notice the behavior of the light in each instance. This exercise will give you a pretty good idea of how a reflector is going to behave in any given situation. Do this exercise often and you will find you can see even the most subtle shifts in light where it was difficult before.
Another quick tip to help you see the difference in contrast in a scene is to squint. It sounds ridiculous, but squinting reduces your vision to blocks of value and you will be able to see the contrast in the scene more easily.
A second strobe serving as fill gives you the most control over how you manipulate your shadows.
Like reflectors, using extra lights as fill is a fundamental skill, albeit one with a slightly steeper learning curve. That said, unlike reflectors, using a dedicated light source allows you full control over the power output, making it much easier than a reflector to control how the light is going to behave.
Varying degrees of contrast between your shadow and highlight tones are possible just by adjusting the power of your fill light.
To get started using a dedicated fill light, place your key light in your desired position and set the power for your desired aperture. Let’s return to that hypothetical of f/8.
Here, a softbox is placed at 45 degrees to the subject.
Knowing your aperture, place your fill light where it will affect the shadows in the manner you would like and set the power output so that it will be underexposed in relation to your aperture. How much you underexpose for is entirely up to you. If you want, say, two stops of fill in this scenario, then you will want your fill light to meter at f/4.
A 7′ parabolic umbrella with diffusion was added about 10-feet away to serve as fill. It was set to meter 2-stops under the key light.
Take a test shot and see if you have your desired effect. Adjust as required and there you go.
In this before (left) and after (right) you can see how the shadows on the right side of the image are lifted and filled in with the fill light.
You can design fill lighting however you like. Feel free to use multiple sources of different sizes and shapes if it works.
Of course, you are not limited to a single fill light. You can have multiple fill lights lighting your subjects from both sides. You can also mix lights and reflectors for different strengths of fill lighting from various angles. You can pretty much do whatever you want in terms of designing a light set-up. You are only limited by the equipment you have at hand and what you can dream up.
Using multiple fill lights allows you to control every aspect of contrast in your images.
An idea is only crazy if it might work and you don’t try it.
1) It’s often better to retain the shadows rather than fill them in completely. This is not a rule, but images that retain some amount of contrast are often more natural and pleasing to the eye.
2) Pay attention to the catchlights in portraits – Extra light sources mean extra catchlights. When you are setting up your lights (reflectors included), be sure to watch the catchlights in your subjects’ eyes. Catchlights can make or break a portrait, so make sure you are controlling them as much as you are the lighting itself.
3) Big light sources at a distance work very well as fill light.
This is by no means a rule, but big light sources (like the 7′ umbrella to camera right) from a distance work really well as fill lighting.
4) Don’t be a slave to the ratios – While using the ratios as a starting point can, and will, be a useful springboard, that doesn’t mean you should adhere to them rigidly. If something isn’t right, adjust as you see fit. Nobody cares in the end if your ratios are exactly 4:1, but they do care if your photos look right. Use your best judgment and change things up if you need to. Sometimes only the tiniest of power adjustments will completely change the end result.
5) Think outside the box – Any light source can be your key and your fill. You’re probably aware that you can use flash to fill-in shadows in natural light, but you can also use natural light as fill where your main lighting is provided by flash.
Here, the key light is a large window to the camera right. The fill light is provided by a strobe. You can mix light sources however you want to achieve your fill lighting.
Hopefully, that’s served as a primer to get you started and demystify fill lighting. Being able to control the contrast in your images with lighting is a fundamental skill that you will be able to use across multiple disciplines. It will allow you to bring a new level of depth to your images straight out of the camera.
Get out and practice, start simple and go slow, and you will master the basics in no time at all.
Try out some of these tips, and share your photos with us in the comments!
The post Getting to Grips with Fill Light in Portrait Photography appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by John McIntire.
Adobe has offered a sneak peek look at the Content-Aware Fill update it will be bringing to Photoshop in the near future. The changes are introduced by Photoshop Product Manager Meredith Stotzner, who explains that Adobe plans to add new ‘Auto’ and ‘Custom’ sampling area options to the tool when it is opened using the application’s Edit menu, these joining the existing ‘Rectangular’ option.
By tapping its Sensei AI technology, the Content-Aware Fill’s new Auto option will analyze the image, find the pixels immediately bordering a selection and then apply the fill using those pixels for an improved final result. The Custom option, meanwhile, gives users complete control over the sampling area selection so that users can ‘brush [their] sampling area from scratch,’ according to Stotzner.
A demonstration of both of these new capabilities have been shared by Adobe in the video above. The company says it will be introducing Auto and Custom to Content-Aware Fill soon, but it hasn’t provided a specific release date at this time. The video indicates the update will arrive before the end of the year.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
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With the annual NAB media show coming up, Adobe has rolled out its spring update for the Creative Cloud video and audio apps, including Premiere Pro, After Effects, Audition, and Character Animator.
After Effects now comes with a new Content-Aware Fill function for video which works pretty much in the same away as the still image version in Photoshop. Users can select an object in the footage that they want removed and Content-Aware Fill does the job automatically, filling in the background.
Premiere Pro now features a new Freeform Project panel that lets you organize clips into select shots, making it easier to build and visualize project ideas. In addition text and graphics alignment is made easier through rulers and guides as well as guide templates that can be shared between After Effects and Premiere Pro. Adobe has also managed to speed up mark tracking. The company says this will make color and effects workflows more efficient. H.264 and HEVC encoding has been optimized for smoother playback in Premiere Pro and After Effects.
In After Effects users have now a an Expressions Editor at their disposal. It was designed with advanced users in mind, for examining code visually and comes with features such as syntax highlighting, line numbers, matching brace highlighting, and code folding.
In Character Animator puppet rigging has been improved to give more personality to characters and new Twitch live-streaming triggers allow for enhanced livestream performances, allowing viewers to engage with characters using real-time costume changes, dance moves, gestures, and poses.
As usual, there are also a range of general bug fixes and performance improvements. All improvements and new features are described in more detail on the Adobe blog. The updates are available now.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
The post 7 Different Situations Where You Can Use Fill Flash Effectively appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Kevin Landwer-Johan.
Many photographers experience anxiety when they think about using flash. It’s a big unknown, difficult to control and to predict what the results might look like.
Knowing when you need to use flash to improve a photograph is just another choice you need to make. A little like deciding what lens to use to take a particular photo. Obtaining the right amount of light from your flash to compliment your picture is key to effective fill flash photography.
© Kevin Landwer-Johan
In this article, I share some thoughts on when and why you might choose to add fill flash. I’ll also walk through seven situations where using fill flash helps enhance a picture.
Fill flash is typically used to balance with the ambient light to provide the main subject with a more pleasing exposure. So you are filling in some additional light to obtain a better or more interesting exposure. Balance is key. When light from a flash overpowers the ambient light, this is not fill flash.
You can make use of fill flash not only at night or in dark locations, but also when there is plenty of light. Fill flash can be used to effectively decrease or eliminate unwanted shadows when the ambient light is very bright.
© Kevin Landwer-Johan
The bright sun casts a hard-edged, dark shadow. When there’s no other light source or reflected light, contrast can cause problems.
Photographing people in bright sunshine they will often have dark shadows under their eyes, nose, and chin. Adding some fill can help to fill in these shadows.
Adding just the right amount of light from your flash is important so it’s balanced with the sunlight. In this photo of a mannequin I saw on the roadside one morning, I have added fill flash. I directed my flash at the smiling figure. I set the output so she was well lit, but her shadow, from the sunlight, is still clear.
© Kevin Landwer-Johan
When you have any light source which causes your main subject to be poorly lit, adding fill flash can help.
The large magnifying glass in this photo has a light behind it to illuminate the electronic board. Had I not added any fill flash, the electronic board would be well exposed, but the white surround of the magnifying glass would be underexposed.
Fill flash can even out the light when it’s important to have everything in your photo well exposed.
© Kevin Landwer-Johan
Photographing your subject with the main light source behind it is known as backlighting. This situation again can create problems when you want evenly exposed photos.
Adding fill flash to a subject which is backlit, you can bring a balance of light and obtain an even exposure.
In this photo of the young woman drinking, I wanted to include the train in the background. The light behind her was quite strong so I balanced it by adding in a burst of flash from my right.
By controlling the flash power to output slightly less light from the ambient light, I was able to leave a soft shadow on her face. Had I not included the flash, the shadow would be too dark and not help convey that it was a hot day so well.
© Kevin Landwer-Johan
Bright backgrounds, even on cloudy days, can sometimes cause you to underexpose your subject if you’re not careful. Adding some flash helps.
The bright background behind my model in this photo was not super bright, as it was an overcast day. I wanted her to be a little brighter than the background, so I placed the flash to my left. I also had a small softbox for the flash so it was diffused to match the feeling of the ambient light.
© Kevin Landwer-Johan
At either end of a day, when the sun is low in the sky or just below the horizon, fill flash can be helpful. Sunrise and sunset can produce beautifully colored skies, but they are often going to be brighter than your subject.
If you set your exposure for the sky, your subject will be underexposed. If you set your exposure for your subject, your sky overexposes and you lose the effect of the color in your photo.
Adding a little flash to your subject, so it’s balanced with the light in the sky, will light your subject and allow the color in the sky to be captured also.
© Kevin Landwer-Johan
This example is a little different but has the same principle. In this case, part of the main subject is the light source.
I photographed this inside. The workshop was fairly dark so the flames were throwing shadows over the dark metal.
Had I not included any flash in this scene, the crucible, tongs, and surrounds would have been too dark. I wanted more detail to be visible in these areas.
© Kevin Landwer-Johan
Any time you have movement in a scene you can use a slow shutter speed to create motion blur in your photos. Using some fill flash can add a whole other dynamic, particularly if you set camera and flash to synchronize well.
Many cameras allow you to set the synchronization to fire the flash just before the second, or rear curtain of the shutter closes. This causes a partial ‘freezing’ of the motion in a more attractive manner.
Again, balancing your flash output is important to achieve the best effect. For this technique, I generally set my flash output to be slightly brighter than the ambient light. If the output is the same or less you will not see the effect much or at all.
© Kevin Landwer-Johan
You do not need to have your flash mounted on your camera’s hot shoe pointing directly at your subject.
Diffusing your flash, or bouncing it off a reflector or other surface, will soften the light. Placing your flash off to one side, above or below, will often produce more interesting, pleasing results.
Controlling the output of your flash is always vital. Too much or too little light from your flash causes an imbalance. You need to decide how much light your photo requires and make the correct adjustments to your flash.
Through the lens (TTL) metering is often the easiest setting. You can also use the Auto mode. Sometimes, with either of these settings, you may need to dial in compensation so the light will be a little stronger or weaker.
Using the Manual setting on your flash requires a little more thought and experimentation. It can often produce a more reliable output from the flash when you are taking a series of photos. This is particularly useful when there are variables in light or camera/subject/background distances.
© Kevin Landwer-Johan
Adding fill flash can make a positive difference to your photos in many situations. When you are not content with the ambient light alone, consider adding a little light from your flash. Even if the only flash you have is the pop up one on your camera.
You may not get the right result the first few times you try this method. Practice. Study your results. Compare photos where you did not use the flash with ones where you did. In time, you will develop a sense for when adding some fill flash will enhance your photographs.
Share some photos in the comments section below and tell us of your experience with using fill flash, whether you were successful or not.
The post 7 Different Situations Where You Can Use Fill Flash Effectively appeared first on Digital Photography School. It was authored by Kevin Landwer-Johan.
Adobe Photoshop’s Content-Aware Fill is the current industry standard when it comes to removing unwanted artifacts and distracting objects, but that might not always be the case. Because while Adobe is currently working on an advanced deep learning-based “Deep Fill” feature, NVIDIA just demonstrated its own AI-powered spot healing tool, and the results are pretty incredible.
As you can see from the two-minute demonstration above, the prototype tool can handle both basic tasks, like removing a wire from a scene, as well as more complicated tasks, such as reconstructing books and shelves inside an intricate library scene.
The secret behind this tool is NVIDIA’s “state-of-the-art deep learning method” that the tool is built on. Not only does the tool use pixels from within the image to reconstruct an area—it actually analyzes the scene and figures out what it should look like when it’s finished. This helps to create a much more accurate and realistic result, even when the original image is an absolute disaster.
The best examples of this can be seen in a paper NVIDIA team members published titled ‘Image Inpainting for Irregular Holes Using Partial Convolutions.’ As seen in the comparison images below, NVIDIA’s tool blows Photoshop out of the water when reconstructing portraits where much or most of the face is removed.
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| From left to right: the corrupted image, Adobe’s Content-Aware results, NVIDIA’s results and the actual image. |
In the discussion section (section 5.1) of the aforementioned paper, NVIDIA says its “model can robustly handle holes of any shape, size location, or distance from the image borders. Further, our performance does not deteriorate catastrophically as holes increase in size.”
NVIDIA does note, however, that “one limitation of our method is that it fails for some sparsely structured images such as the bars on the door,” as seen in the image comparison below.
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| From left to right: the corrupted image, NVIDIA’s results and the original image. |
Current shortcomings aside, this particular tool—prototype or otherwise—appears to be leaps and bounds ahead of everyone else that’s currently on the market. Unsurprisingly, there’s no word on when, or if, we’ll ever see this hit the market, let alone in the consumer market, but we’ll keep our fingers and toes crossed.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
Using a flash or speedlight on-camera can be daunting at first. This was certainly how I felt when I first purchased my Nikon speedlight. My biggest worry was calculating all the light ratios involved to get a proper exposure as you cannot take into account the actual flash output when metering in-camera. I was also nervous about using a light meter – all that trial and error and faffing, the thought of it all used to make me quake in my boots and swear I’d forever be a natural light photographer. But that was not to be, thankfully.
My main reservation about using flash is the harshness of the light. I hate the “flashed” look on people’s faces, the shadows under the jaws, the bright circular catchlights right in the middle of the iris. As well, the flatness of the face with the direct flash obliterating all possibility of sculpting shadows on the face.
But I live in London where it rains quite a bit, it’s hardly sunny at all, and half the year is cold. All these factors affect natural light and I felt I just had to put aside my reservations and take the leap. And I’m so glad I did.
Let me share with you how I use flash to help me achieve the look I am after and without having to do the mental calculations of light ratios!
It may only be a little plastic thing that goes on top the flash head but I find it makes a difference. The light is less harsh – I know many will disagree about whether it softens the light or not as that is mainly due to the size of light and distance to subject – but I notice a softness from a diffused flash head compared to a bare one.
Left: without a diffuser. Right: with a diffuser.
I only use a flash bare and pointed towards the camera when I am using it as a kicker light and want starburst effects coming from it.
Set your flash to manual and choose the power. I’m usually at 1/32 or 1/16 and leave it there. Adjust the flash power only when absolutely necessary. Instead, make the frequent necessary adjustments to your camera settings.
Now I know there are many big fans of ETTL / TTL mode out there. I have tried it too. However, I have gone back to Manual as I find the TTL does not give me the look I want. Essentially, I only want my flash to be a fill light, not the main light and never too strong so that you can see a huge difference between the light coming from the flash and the ambient light. The ETTL / TTL mode is too smart for my needs and increases the output to a pretty high level if it senses that the ambient light is too weak, and vice versa. I felt I’d get an inconsistent output of light for the look I am after although that output may be “correct” in terms of the calculations.
For portraits, I find that the greater the contrast between the dark background and the illumination of the subject with a flash gun, the more I dislike the image. For dancing shots (like at a wedding), however, where I want to illuminate the subject well and freeze the action, I DO point my flash directly at the subject, stop down my aperture to between f/5.6 and f/8 and lower my shutter speed between 1/20th and 1/60th in order to capture ambient light and light trails or background blurring to give the effect of movement.
This image was created using a bare bulb flash (no diffuser) located behind and pointing directly at the couple (off-camera flash). I also had a second flash on-camera with a diffuser, and the flash aimed upward.
This image was created with a diffused flash pointed directly at the couple (camera in front of the couple, flash on-camera) while they were dancing. The motion blur was created by using a slow shutter speed and “dragging the shutter” after the flash has fired.
What I’m after is always a natural look, which, depending on where the main light is coming from, may not be achieved well without some kind of fill or reflected light to illuminate areas that are too dark for my intentions. This is the reason why I always bounce or angle my flash gun for most scenarios other than dancing as explained above.
On some newer models, there is also a little white pull-out bounce card that is extremely useful if your ceilings are too high for the light to bounce off or you just want to point reflected light in a particular direction. When I shoot weddings where the rooms have very high ceilings or dark beams and ceilings. So I pull out the bounce card and use it to deflect the light coming from the flash. The handy swivel action helps me direct the reflected light wherever I want it to go.
My speedlight with the white bounce card extended.
As an aside, I use this setup for off-camera flash too. When I’m putting two speedlights opposite each other in a room to provide directional light during speeches, I point the flash heads upwards and pull out the diffuser so that all the reflected light is pointed inwards towards the center of the room.
The head of most speedlights can swivel right and left up to 90 degrees each way and forward and upward to 90 degrees in incremental angles. It is an awesome functionality that you should take advantage of especially for fill flash.
In the photos below, bright sunlight was coming from camera right at 45 degrees on a bright day. All I wanted was a bit of fill flash on their shadowed faces, just enough to lift the shadows a tad. What I really wanted to avoid was for the image to look like there was another light source other than that from the sun. To achieve this, I angled my speedlight upwards towards the back by one increment.
As you can see, these photos below have very strong sunlight coming directly at the subjects and towards the camera, a very strong backlit light. It is extremely difficult to overpower this type of light without using a strong flash. What I did was angle myself slightly to one side and pointed my flash directly at the subjects’ faces to try and counteract the sunlight.
This is when I adjust my flash power and increase it accordingly. The result is not as clean and sharp as if I had a big softbox firing at 70% ratio to the sun’s power but it still shows the faces clearly enough with some diffused hazy light in the background, which was also my intention for these shots.
Compare the two images below. The one on the left was taken in a big open space with a dense foliage background which blocked the light. There was enough light here to illuminate their faces that I could have done away with the flash altogether, but I pointed the flash backward to add just a tiny bit of light over my head. I don’t think it made a huge difference but it made me feel better and consistent!
The image on the right was taken in a shaded open area surrounded by tall trees which diffused the light coming from the background. Without the trees, it would have had the unfiltered effect as above, but despite the trees, this is still very much a backlit position as the background was very bright still. More fill light was needed there so I pointed the speedlight slightly upwards, with one increment down towards the subjects but not directly at their faces.
You can see the same flash angle as above on these close-up portraits below.
In the same spot as above, I wanted a look that was a little moodier than those close-ups so I pointed the speedlight directly upwards this time. So although their faces are still amply lit up, the image to feels like they are being enveloped by the diffused light behind them.
The couple wanted a shot showing the lake and the trees in the far distance. The distance was too great to get the couple and the background sharp enough without using a really small aperture and a lot of artificial light (flash). Note that we were also in the shaded part of the lake which made it more difficult. I decided therefore that I would take a cozy shot that focused mainly on the background. The couple looking towards the trees, although they are not the lit focal point, they are still clearly visible and sharp. I pointed the speedlight slightly forwards to give them just a hint of light and shot with a small aperture.
Contrast the top image below to the photo directly underneath it where the depth of field has changed massively – the background now is blurry and the couple is in focus. This had the same angle of flash, slightly forwards, but of course, my camera settings changed to a wider aperture and lower ISO to balance the exposure. Now with the couple still in the same shaded spot, the angled flash was clearly essential here. Had I pointed the flash directly to their faces, it would have been too obvious and would kill the natural light ambiance that I was aiming for.
For this ring shot below, we sat on a bench with the sunlight coming from camera left. I put the ring on my phone to get a dark background and a nice reflection. With ring shots, I always stop down to at least f/7 with a macro lens. Therefore I need to make sure there is plenty of light for the shot as macro lenses tend to suck light.
I also always use a speedlight pointed directly opposite the main light. So in this case where the light is at camera left at 8 o’clock (if you’re looking at a clock face with the diamond at 6 o’clock), I swiveled my flash head to the opposite at around 4 o’clock to give off a bit of reflected light on the right side of the ring.
Likewise, on the photo below, you can clearly see where the sunlight is coming from so I pointed my speedlight slightly upwards to camera left, opposite the sunlight. This angle helped me achieve a gradual decrease of light from right to left as opposed to a dramatic one where you can see a clear cut-off from light to dark.
If you haven’t tried using flash like this before, I encourage you to do so. Experiment and see how it could work for you. You don’t need to learn the lighting ratios and calculations off by heart to be able to get images you are after, although that could be handy.
Sometimes all you need is confidence, common sense, and a willingness to try. I hope you found this little tutorial useful. If you have more tips, share them in the comments below.
The post How to Use an On-Camera Speedlight as Fill Flash for Portraits by Lily Sawyer appeared first on Digital Photography School.
The coolest technology to come out of Adobe MAX is, sadly, not the technology we already have access to. Like Adobe’s Project Cloak we showed you earlier today, it’s the incredible ‘Sneaks’ sneak peeks that really wow the audience. Case in point: check out Project Deep Fill, a much more powerful, AI-driven version of Content Aware Fill that makes the current tool look like crap… to put it lightly.
Deep Fill is powered by the Adobe Sensei technology—which “uses artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and deep learning”—and trained using millions of real-world images. So while Content Aware Fill has to work with the pixels at hand to ‘guess’ what’s behind the object or person you’re trying to remove, Deep Fill can use its training images to much more accurately create filler de novo.
The examples used in the demo video above are impressive to say the least:
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And just when you thought the demo is over, you find out that Deep Fill can also take into account user inputs—like sketching—to completely alter an image:
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In this way it’s a lot more than a ‘fill’ feature. In fact, Adobe calls it “a new deep neural network-based image in-painting system.” Check out the full demo for yourself above, and then read all about the other ‘Sneaks’ presented at Adobe MAX here.
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
Yesterday at Adobe MAX, the lucky attendees got to see a few of Adobe’s signature “Sneaks”: sneak peeks at crazy features that are in development. And chief among them this year was something code-named Adobe Cloak.
In essence, Adobe Cloak is the video-editing counterpart to Photoshop’s Content Aware Fill. Simply outline the portion of your video that you would like removed—be it a stationary object or a couple walking through your scene—and Adobe Cloak will intelligently erase them from the shot. This is, of course, something VFX artists have been doing for ages, but automating the process to this degree is impressive to say the least.
Adobe sent us a few demo videos of the feature in action, which you can check out above. And if you want more details about how Adobe Cloak works/was developed, Engadget got to sit down with Adobe research engineer Geoffrey Oxholm and VFX product manager Victoria Nece to talk about the technology, which is still “in the experimental stages.”
The bad news is, there’s no current plans to implement it. The good news? They wouldn’t be working on it if they didn’t plan to implement it some time, right!?
Articles: Digital Photography Review (dpreview.com)
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