Hello everyone, Xiaobian has met with you again. Today I bring you an article, let's talk about the shooting techniques of backlit portraits. Author @ Take a picture of Cocoan
Why are backlit portraits always so eye-catching? Let's start with a few backlit portraits.
The best look of the backlit portrait lies in the contour light of the character, which is very important, you can see that the model's hair is surrounded by golden light, very good-looking, because this contour light can separate the character and the background, so that the picture is more layered, the second eye-catching is that the backlight can illuminate a better-looking light spot, increasing the sense of atmosphere of the picture.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > preparation:</h1>
First of all, like the landlord in Chengdu all year round is basically gray weather, it is difficult to encounter sunny days and the air is very transparent weather, so I often pay attention to the weather, now there are many weather forecast app on the mobile phone, you can often pay attention to, find that there is good weather when you contact the model in advance, good communication. Friends with conditions can bring an external flash, no light can bring a reflector, if there is no two, you can wear a white or light clothing (with the light color of the clothes can be slightly anti-light), this is why murmur, because in the backlight environment shooting, the face is back to the sun, so the face will be very dark, then if you do not fill the face then the later stage will be relatively troublesome, so we can do a good job in the early stage as much as possible not to put it in the later stage to do, because the landlord does not have both belts, So only the later stages
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > shooting:</h1>
The best time for backlight shooting is the time when the sun is about to go down, because each place will have a time difference or spring, summer, autumn and winter changes, here I will not say the specific time, probably is the ground plane and the angle between the sun between 20-35 degrees is very suitable for shooting backlight, the shooting site is also relatively open to the place, not suitable for shooting in the place where high-rise buildings are lined up, because the surrounding buildings are too high to block the sun from being backlit
At that time, my camera position was in front of the model, if you have a flash or reflector, you can put it in the direction of the model at 45 degrees, remember that the flash and reflector are best not to light the model, the reason is that this will make the model's facial features not three-dimensional, so choose to fill the light at the model's 45 degree angle So the model's facial features will be more three-dimensional, if there is no reflector and external shooting light friends can choose exposure compensation plus two gears, so that the model's face is brighter, there are more details, after saying the early stage, we will talk about the later stage
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" > post-retouching:</h1>
Let's analyze the original film first, first of all, the picture is darker, grayer, because there is no fill light, the face is very dark, and the atmosphere of the surrounding environment is also very flat
Figure 1 above is the acne removal 2 is the part that needs to be brightened
The first step is to use the repair tool to dry out the acne, eye bags, and wrinkles on the face, because the model's base is better, so here I handle it more easily, only the eye bags and wrinkles are removed, and the second part uses the combination of the curve tool and the mask to brighten the edges of the face and hair
The comparison chart after the first step of the face repair can be found that the face is cleaner
Then we combine the use of curves and masks in the second part
You can find it in our adjustment panel, and clicking on the curve will create a curve layer with a white mask
The white mask is to display the effect, the black mask is not displayed, and the transition between the black and white masks is: first select the mask with the mouse, and then ctrl+i can freely switch between the black and white masks, so how do we achieve only the face and hair edges are brightened and the rest of the place does not change
First pull the curve up to brighten the picture as a whole, and then select the mask ctrl+i with the mouse to reverse change to black, and the brightening effect disappears
1 select the brush tool, 2 select the foreground color as white (press D to make the foreground color white), 3 mouse selection mask can be smeared on the face and hair edge of the screen, (ps: mask is a very powerful tool in the ps can achieve a lot of local adjustment effects, we must learn and use this tool well)
Finally, the renderings of our facial processing. After the brightening, you can see that the edges of the face and hair are brighter than before, and then we render the surrounding environment, and then I use the 3D LUT to render the color lookup.
Let me briefly mention here that 3D LUT is a preset that increases color saturation after use, and can also make colors shift
The adjustment panel selects the color lookup that is the 3D LUT
My 3D LUT preset here uses fallcolors.look, this preset is to increase the saturation of yellow, we can see that after using this warm color place has been well strengthened and rendered, but the use of each picture is not the same, do not rigid set, should be flexible application, do here is basically over, and finally I used a light factory plug-in to add a halo
I chose the first effect of the light factory, plus after going to feel very strange and scary, but you see the right side of the picture there are a lot of effects are ticked, in fact, I only need two effects inside
Cancel everything else you don't want and click OK
This is the effect of this after I added the light factory, but the light factory will look more fake after adding it, at this time I lowered the opacity of this layer to make the light appear, which will be more realistic