Little Gems 2: Shooting with ring flash for a fashion magazine editorial for Arabella. Step by Step guide for post production on the image.
Although a very simple lighting set up, ring flash can be fantastic or a complete disaster if your not careful. I will describe the steps I went through to achieve the fashion image bellow.
As explained, shooting with ring flash is very simple but there are a couple of words of advice to avoid your resulting images being a total disaster.
First I will describe what a ring flash is for those that are not aware.
Originally the ring flash was developed in1952 by Lester A Dine, as a dental/medical photographers accessory.
As its name suggests it is basically a flash that has been manufactured to fit around the front of a lens, allowing for flash lighting of macro photography, these days they come in 3 main sizes, quite small as per the traditional ring flash for shooting dental/surgical procedures designed to allow the photographer to work within an operating theatre environment with out using cumbersome traditional on camera flash or off camera flash kit, which takes up space as well as can get in the way of operating theatre procedures, as well as giving the photographer the ability to shoot operation procedures close up.
The ring flash used for the images to the upper left was specifically designed to use for portrait/fashion photography.
These used to come in 2 main sizes, c9in ring flash from companies like Broncolor or Profoto or 12in ring flash from Bowens or Elinchrom, due to the popularity of the 9in version being more portable and designed so you can shoot hand held with the ring flash attached to your cameras tripod screw plus the range of modifiers and accessories being available.
The larger ring flash seams to have stopped being manufactured.
The image was shot with the Nikon D100 with an18 to 35mm lf2.8 lens, fl was at 27mm exposure was f11 at 125 sec, at 200asa (iso) Power of ring flash set to give a reading of f11 with flash to subject distance at aprox 10ft.
The story line for the editorial was glitzy celebrities out to play, so I chose to give the images a paparazzi press shot look by shooting the whole fashion story with a ring flash, it gives a hard, bright shadowless illumination on your subject and if your shoot close to a back ground, a shadow all around your subject. see the image to the right. You can use a diffuser, a honey come grid or leave the flash with no modifier to give a really hard light. I chose to tape some 1.5 stop scrim diffuser over the flash to soften just a little to keep the press feel to the lighting.. See other images from the editorial lower down on the right.
The ring flash that I used has no censor, so once you have taken the flash reading you must keep your flash/camera to subject distance the same for every shot or adjust your settings/power output accordingly if you do, if you move closer, you will over expose, further away and you under expose. Also its always best to keep the ring flash parallel to your subject, as well as at mid height to your model. ie too low and working close, as I often am, gives fast fall off so your model will not be evenly lit from head to toe. I usually stay at mid hight level to my model. You will notice that the lighting, if you get it right, appears to be soft and can hide a multitude of sins, i,e wrinkles etc. I still brief my make up artist that I will be using harsh light and to make sure make up is very matted, unless Im after a shimmery look.
Like any lighting set up your not familiar with, its always best to experiment before you shoot to make sure your results are as you wish them to be.
Post Production/Photoshop Retouching
I have chosen a different but similar frame to the one in above to work on.
When the image has been processed in camera raw, I assess what is needed to be done, apart from the initial exposure and contrast, i,e with an image such as the image left, which is the un retouched, processed raw file, as you can see, the image lacks contrast as well as being not quite as saturated as I would like.
Bellow are the various steps that I did in Photoshop to make the image as I envisaged when I shot it.
Assessing the image.
In order to put some punch into the shot, i will darken the wall behind my model, then add some contrast to the dress, brighten up her skin, darken/enrich her hair, slim down her waist just a little to emphasize her body in liquify, the dress was stretchy and sort of hid her waist line. I will create a mask so i can protect the areas of the image that I do not want to alter.
Apart from the above theres not a lot I would do to this images.
A Little Info About My Workflow
I always shoot a raw file and a small jpg, and drop them into separate folders when transferring image files from my flash cards to my computer, as well as copy the image files onto an external hard drive as backup. The small jpgs I will burn onto CD or DVD, to give to my client after we have finished shooting, so they have a complete set of small jpgs from the shoot for them to do their selecting with, also, I know its antiquated but I like to do a manual workflow and to be in control of my image files.
My editing process is done with the small jpgs mainly for speed. When I have narrowed my choices down to c 3 or 4 options, I transfer the final choice images into the folder containing my raw files, this highlights the raw files to be batch processed in camera raw into usable images files.
I will talk about my work flow in another article.
STEP 1: Save As A Tiff
I like to keep a master of the processed un-retouched images files and work on a copy of the image tif.
When saving As, make sure you tick IBM box in byte order box or people using PCs will not be able to open or use the tif image.
Because there is so little photoshop to be done on this image, as well as the retouching i will be doing is not destructive, so Im going to work without using layers.
STEP 2: Increasing The Overall Contrast Of The Image.
II used mage adjust curves, dropped the lower section of the curve down to increase density and lifted the top section of the curve to lighten the brighter areas of the image. This gives the image more contrast and punch as well as increasing saturation.
I also added a little more contrast and lightened up her face in curves, see image above.
STEP 4: Adding Vibrance.
To lift the vibrance of the image I used image adjust vibrance, moved the vibrance slider to the right. This will increase saturation a little too much so i cut back some of the saturation.
STEP 5: Creating A Mask.
I created a mask to protect the areas that I did not want altered. To do this I selected the easiest areas to make a magic want selection of, i,e the model and her dress,
With the magic wand select tool set at a tolerance of 32, I clicked on the models dress automatically selecting a large amount of what i wanted to select, by holding down the caps key and clicking again and again to select each other area that was not selected that I wanted to be selected, i,e the varying tones on her dress, her hands, her face, her arms etc.
When all is selected, I inversed the selection so its now the background/wall behind the model that is the area selected, its now almost ready to be adjusted in curves. BUT like the magnetic select tool, the magic wand can be unpredictable and will need some adjustment to make sure that you have made a good selection of the areas not to be adjusted in step 7
Bellow is how I correct the selection to make sure my mask is accurate..
Accurate Selection: Turn on the red mask by clicking the box with a circle in, its at the bottom of your tool bar,, this will highlight the areas selected and not, like in the previous Little Gem 1, you can add to either the selected or not selected areas by painting in or erasing the mask using either a hard edge or feathered edge on the tool as well as using at different sizes for more intricate areas. See image bellow left.
STEP 7: Liquify Waist.
In filters, I clicked liquify, the image opened in a liquify window, the masked off background areas will be red as per the image above. The areas to be liquified/slimmed will not be masked off, see the image above areas that are not masked in red.
I selected the Forward Warp Brush, its the top tool in the tool bar on the left of the liquify window, I adjusted the size of the brush to be big enough to cover more than the area of the waist to be slimmed, see image above, in the brush size box on the panel on the right of the liquify window. I placed the center of the warp brush on the edge of her waist, clicke and drage the waist line in just enough so it still looks natural. As you can see I have slimmed the waist slightly on either side. The area of background thats now showing outside the masked area we will retouch at the next step.
See the difference on before and after images left.
You need to be careful to keep the waist line looking natural.
If you look closely you will see that the wall behind just adjacent to her waist that I slimmed is slightly stretched, I will show you how to correct this later.
STEP 6: Darkening Background.
To darken the background I used, Image, adjust, curves, pulling down the lower section of the curve to darken the background and lifted the top section just a little to increase the contrast.
Keeping the selection on I inversed it ready to open the image in liquify.. When opened in liquify It will look like the image bellow, although I did the liquify on the waist line before cleaning up the selected areas, hence the mask still showing in areas of the image that will not be adjusted in liquify.
Feather Selected Edges: Now that I have created an accurate selection separating my models body from the background, I click off the red mask, now i need feather the edge of the selection by just 2 pixels, which will help to not show an obvious edited edge between my model and the back ground. See image right.
STEP 8: Retouch Damaged Back Ground.
I have created a new selection of the models dress, much the same as in step 5 so I could mask off the dress from the background, and then reversed the selection so I could use the cloning brush to pick up undamaged areas of the wall behind and clone them back in right up to the edge of the dress, notice how I have lined up the lines of the wall before clicking so you can not tell that I have been using liquify which will have been noticeable if I had not cloned back in the damage edges.
The Finished Image
