Get something that is near and dear to your heart: A teacup from your grandmother, a clay artpiece from your kid’s secong grade class, anything. Grasp it in your hands and sit in a quiet space in your home. Close your eyes and relax. Things will go through your mind, things not even related to what you are holding. Let all things pass through your consciousness. What you will be searching for are the stories that come in relation to that piece you are holding. The stories may not be necessarily true! It could be a story from a far off place.

The key is to write down what you saw when you are done (it only takes about 5-10 minutes, but if you can go longer… You want to remember those fantasies and then the magic begins. You start creating what’s in your heart, not someone else’s.

The Artist’s Way - Julia Cameron

The Artist’s Way Workbook - Julia Cameron

Walking in this World - Julia Cameron

Finding Water - Julia Cameron

I mean Deke

Really – don’t fear the LAB Colorspace – it’s Zen beauty!!

First we retouch the skin to taste, consider the light when you do (opensextensive skin retouch tutorial)!

After skin retouch we have a richer and more directional feel to the light.

A Black and white conversion using L*A*B* color mode for luminosity.  A very classy B+W conversion.  Once we’ve shown the client the expected results we can easily proof them something more artistic, and unexpected using Beautiful Blurs, or Lighting Overlays.

Here a basic texture file from the Bleautiful Blur Overlays – Volume 2 gives the picture a little blue juice which contrasts the warmth of the skin with a Photoshop layer mode of soft light.

the Lighting Overlays Disk 1 streaky image, gives the image a funky modern splash on the left side when I used a Photoshop Layer mode of screen.

There are two answers to why to be creative – one is from your own motivation, the other is to sell more to your clients.  With the ONE ACTION workflow you could complete this whole series in less than 3min simply saving out a JPEG at each stage.

 .  . 

Just for fun for you to watch – but what I picked up in the trailer, was the speach Carlos uses in the trailer.  Catching it at 1:29 Carlos says enough to show you that it’s NOT ABOUT LIGHTING.  Too bad his DVD title is cliche, seems his approach is genuinely creative.  At 1:35 – that’s powerful relationship Carlos is using to empower his model, and is what really impressed me.  Don’t ever forget that the relationship trumps the lighting and if your subject relationship comes before anything technical you have to do.  I also found a talk-through by Carlos on the livebooks site on lighting topics – so you can get a deeper dose of his work:

liveBooks – See the Light: Fashion, Passion, and Inspiration

After Flash:


Softer Balance:

I’m using my usual Alien Bee 800 with 11 inch silver reflector on a vagabond power pack unit.

What do I mean softer balance?  Can you see it?

The effect of changing your exposure to be able to capture the sky is a matter of balancing your strobe output with the brightness of the sky.  Here in these New York afternoon portraits I wanted to get the light streaming through the clouds as well as the antique aircraft while managing to highlight the bride and groom.  Checking my exposure for sky values led me to decrease my ISO to 100, increase my shutter speed to 1/250th of a second which is limited by flash sync speed, and then choose an aperture that under exposes the sky by 1-2 stops.  The final variable – to my thinking the only variable (as the other features of the image are dictated by my goals) is how much output should I set the flash to.

Do you see how I isolated my variables and got down to the core decision?

Not sure if I wrote that clearly, but that is the essence of ‘Hear the Shadows’……

Regarding Gear, the reason I carry such high powered strobes is to be able to make decisions without limitation by my flash output.  

Getting down to post production

Blue Skies – Lightroom Preset

I used my Blue Skies Lightroom preset and then moved into photoshop’s L*A*B* colorspace

I have a few posts coming up describing how to get the most out of your situation even if you really want to shoot directly into the sun. Here’s a good example with a vintage style applied with the ONE WORKFLOW actionset. I was able to quickly modify my overall contrast type with a single adjustment layer to lower the contrast and flatten the highlights. In the same layer, just a quick shortcut away, I tinted the global yellow (warmth) saturated the green, and tweaked the red, and darkened the blue. L*A*B* color mode is ingenious that way. A texture from the ‘Dark Descent’ texture package helped dapple and roughen the tonalities in an organic and random way.

So there you see how I use all the facets of photography, lighting, and photoshop to create a memorable set of portraits. Take a loot at their thank-you card design:

Read more to think outside the box in lighting large spaces for maximum creative impact…

This wedding is taking place in Founder’s Hall at the Milton Hershey School, which is providing the extraordinary ceremony entrance for Elizabeth.  The lighting I created is what’s allowing me to take such a dramatic, regal, and poignant capture at the moment her husband Scott looks up to see her for the first time!  I work as a wedding photojournalist, but I want to go beyond my client’s experiences to create pieces of art that fully describe those important moments in their lives with the frozen time power of the camera.  Notice the details in this image which was shot with my Canon 1Ds MarkII with a 50mm lens – so there’s no wide angle distortion of the height here.  You can see the individual expressions of the bridesmaids, you can see the guest holding out their point and shoot camera to capture the bride; but only my shot captures the whole space with a pleasing illumination helping to define all these elements.

Are you asking if this is natural light?

It is in-fact strobe.  Not something a little strobist could produce, but stadium sized strobe lighting. Here’s what the scene looks like without strobe:

Here is just a split second later (litterally two frames) where I had depleted the charge of the flash units by shooting continuous frames.  Ok, ok, that’s not totally fair cause I didn’t white balance it….let me give you a white balanced view just to be absolutely fair – I’ll even size it the same.

My raw file tells me I shot at 1/200th of a second @ f/2.8 with an iso of 500.

In my highlighted image you can see leftward leaning shadows from the marble pillars, but wouldn’t you rather have than then the backlit shot?

Make Light Real – is a process that can guide you to realizing your creative vision, whether it be in a enormous vault of a room like founder’s hall, or in a tiny sitting room.  Let’s talk about how the light is real, after we see a few more of the impossible without it pictures:

With strobe above ^ without strobe below V

The slight amount of direct light from the strobe hitting the side of the bride’s face cast’s a weak sharp shadow, and overall helps to sharpen the image.  Sharpening in the image isn’t just something you do in post production.  Here are a couple of my highlight images from the wedding:

I added a little atmospheric lighting affect with photoshop.

Here’s an emotional look at the bride from between the groomsmen’s shoulders and some darkening from my veritas vignette overlays.  All the contrast and wonderful shaping of the face is a result of my lighting setup, and balance of the strobe with the ambient.

Let me give you one more comparison that uses an isle shot to give you a look at how my lighting approach allows me to shoot in otherwise extremely difficult positions.

The bride received this shot in B+W and here it is.  Because I am using lighting off axis to my camera, I am able to shoot through the guests to reach my focal plane to the ring bearer and flower girl telling the full story of them coming down the isle.  Without the strobe illumination, I would be getting an overpowering flare from the outside light coming through the glass doors.

Shooting faster than my flashes can recycle I am proud to show you what it would look like without flash illumination.  You can certainly lighten it, but without the light getting into the eyes, and shaping the face and body, you’re just lightening a soft and flat photo.

Here now a couple more steps down the isle, you can see the flash illumination from the side, and the overall ambient is brought up to the shutter speed and low ISO of the camera settings.  If you were limited to using an on-camera flash, you would have two white heads in the foreground and two large shadows on the children.  If you tried to bounce, you’d be thinking – where’d that light go? – cause this is the size of the room!

I couldn’t find the stated height of the dome, but it stands about 4 stories tall.

So we’re talking about lighting a working space two stories tall, and probably 40-45 meters wide.  We know that the bride is coming out the doors on the second story to overlook the ceremony before descending to walk the isle – a very dramatic choice and one we want to help illustrate in our pictures.  Here’s a quick look at the finished setup of my lights and then I’ll talk about how I got to that setup.

Yep, three monolights!  Two Alien Bee 800Watt units, One Photogenic 400Watt monolight.  The alien bee units have the 11inch dish reflector on them, the Photogenic has the standard 7inch reflector.  Each unit is at 1/4 power.  We’ll refer to them from right to left AB1, AB2, and PG3.  Let me give you a 4 shot walkthrough of the whole space so you can how the light is filling the space.  

Starting from the right with the lights in the frame

Here you can see where the focus of my light is collecting on the domed ceiling.

Creative balance is the path to Making Light Real

That is why we study the Tao

So back to the lights PG3 was the ’sparkle’ light – it was set to point directly at my subjects, albiet at a lower power, but that small amount of direct, hard-light provides a giant increase in perceived sharpness.  If you would like to understand the effect find yourself some deep shade and set your exposure to be accurate, then add just a light touch of hard light source (like a small shoe flash) at -2 or -1 to the exposure.  It’s very important that the amount of light you add doesn’t change the exposure.  Notice it in small details,the way hair or skin texture is rendered.

Deeper perception leads to greater creation.

Ok, so the challenge was to use the Alien Bees to give me a very soft(in quality of the light) boost in my ambient light quantity.  To do that I must transfer the source of the lighting from a small one at the strobe head to a large one – like a three story dome, if I only had a perfect dome the size of the room.  Oh wait – I do.  Yea so pushing the light into the far side of the room to provide a balanced exposure was the goal.  The Alien Bee 11 inch reflector is the perfect tool for the job because it is highly efficient, no light power is lost, and it throws the light out in a gentle cone so that no direct light falls on the ceremony location because that would completely throw off the balance and quality of the light.  AB1 is covering the walls and ceiling to the back of the room, opposite the balcony and ceremony.  AB2 is throwing it’s light up and over to the dome top and left side of the balcony.  The Alien Bees are putting out roughly 16x more light than the Photogenic to fill the entire auditorium with an extremely gentle light.  Hopefully that illustrates the power necessary to reach certain creative goals, and the freedom that the power gives you in your working process.

Why three, couldn’t just one light do it?

Yes, but without the same control over the balance – I’ll be covering how to balance a bare bulb flash in several tutorials over the next couple weeks.  Secondly, one strobe unit would almost certainly need to be at full power output, which exceeds the recycle time needed after each shot.  I wish to be able to shoot continuous bursts of 3-5 shots and so I adjust my setups to only use 1/4 or less of the flash output giving me that 4 shot burst.

Leave any more questions you have in the comments and I’ll answer them.

If you like this training article, consider purchasing the Video Tutorial on the color blue and continue improving your photographic perception and craft.

John Reuter shows us a basic screen-cast exploring Photoshop documents layer blending options.  As you’re learning to apply textures, or vignettes to an image for artistic or tonal effects – you should understand these options intuitively.  The best way to learn after watching this image would be to work over a couple images and utilize these different techniques to modify different portions of the tonal range.  Work on targeting the highlights, mid-tones and shadows independently as you build up your awareness and control in photoshop.

If you don’t have any files to use to mix together download one from our Free Stuff Category, or try this one.

YouTube – Layer Styles Blending with John Reuter

I’m grateful for you interest in my work. I was teaching in the UK back in June and joined the BPPA.  I hope my work continues to take me around the world. I’m disappointed to tell you that no filter set will help you achieve a unique look – in fact quite the opposite will occur….I’ve a strong opinion on this, so sorry if I come off well – opinionated!

You can listen to some of my theories from my creative journal, try out: http://makelightreal.com/blue-photoshop-tutorial/ as a start.

You’ll find that my philosophy is to approach each image as a blank canvas, respond to the elements and develop the picture to the highest emotional state I feel possible. Some images receive careful raw conversion for color and contrast, but no more alteration:

Some receive a greater amount of attention, usually to help get at the emotion/effect I’m feeling:

Much of it simply has to do with basic doge and burn, which accomplish with a simple workflow that operates in lab color mode: http://makelightreal.com/one-action-photoshop-workflow-tutorial/ So the premise of my action set is to make the basics of art theory/color theory as close to possible to my fingertips to be able to reach for the tool, and have it as close to my subconscious artistic mind as possible.

The trouble with filters are they encourage you to push a button instead of stretch your inner vision abilities

The goal I reach for in my photoshop workflow actions, is the quickness to achieve the look that resonates with my heart – but also avoid the pitfall of escaping from true artistic resonance.  Let me just type out the inner dialog that might occur when I open an image into my workflow.  First off as I open an image, I’m often distracted from the focal point and emotional resonance by some feature in the photo, most often the response is to doge down (darken that element) – this is one of the biggest reasons I work in L*A*B* as you need to dodge to color.  Removing a distracting element is a negative action, so I will often look next at what needs to come out – or be highlighted – in positive response.  The automated adjustment layers in the ONE Actionset are not the solution, they are a starting point that is at my fingertip to customize.  As I open the layer I seek the specific curve that blends with the rest of the picture and resonates with the artistic vibe in that picture. Or I do one of a number of advanced curve adjustments that do everything from smoothing freckles to polarizing areas of the tonal scale.  This pause is not bad, it’s cause for careful reflection.  The adjustment layers can interact with texture layers, vignette layers, and be re-ordered to refine and define your intended result.  

The goal for the ONE Actionset is to put reflection without distraction at your fingertips.

Tao 46
There is no greater calamity

Than not knowing what is enough.

Howard Gardner, who developed the theory of multiple intelligences, joins Kurt and Sarah on stage for a session of free advice. He analyzes audience members’ big life-changing moments, and gets Sarah to fess up about how her impersonation skills came in handy when playing hooky from high school.  Tell your story about life change decision on the Studio 360 website.

The theory of multiple intelligences was what empowered me to change my life – it was thrilling to hear the interview with Howard Gardner.  I was studying Biology: Systems Ecology when I realized I couldn’t force myself to pass chemistry.  I was also doing more rock climbing than studying.  When I was exposed to the theory of multiple intelligences it gave me the freedom to realize that I was visually oriented to the world, as well as kinetically.  It made way more sense than trying to force myself to study something for a career.  It felt so natural, when I heard complements like ‘your climbing looks like a ballerina!’ and I could accept as intelligence the compulsion to make things beautiful.  The simple truth of it fit like a glove.

So I dropped the Bio major and went to declare an art major.  Despite the skepticism of the art professor taking my application to start an art major in my Junior year of college - I had been shooting and printing my own black and white prints in the Science department’s unused darkroom – and I got in.  

It kinda proves the theory – that I could shoot and print my work without being taught.

So thanks Mr. Gardner – it was really fun to hear your voice and discernment.

I was able to present to the group a motivational lecture, an on-location shoot, and an image review and quick post processing example after dinner.  However to extend your experience, I’m going to provide you with some original Canon 1Ds raw files shot that day to try your hand at lab color mode post processing, as well as altering the mood of the photo with a lighting overlay image you can download from the Create Cart:

Have a brand new free texture from me as you check out from the cart – there are a few more free ones and several sets of high resolution texture and lighting files if you are interested.

Now on to the full raw file downloads:

Download Test file one (13mb Canon CR2 raw file): Blue background accentuated by a tungsten gelled main flash, if you weren’t there you can download this screen cast movie file to learn to process your files for rich and vibrant blues : or view this post page on photoshop manipulating the blue in images.  This image would be a fun one to try out the texture – if you try it – post a link in the comments to your blog page, flickr page, or other way to see your results. In this image we use the principles of Make Light Real:

• provide a clear subject – by making the subject brighter than the background
• create compelling color and contrast – by altering the flash color temperature with a gel to warm it
• compose the unexpected – I waited until the boat was in the right place to add the added ’story line’ to the photo

Download Test file two (13mb Canon CR2 raw file): another gelled image of the model on the rock, this is would be a great candidate for the lighting overlay you downloaded from above.

Download Test file three (13mb Canon CR2 raw file): a strong test of balancing the very dark nigerian model with the bright summer sky on the lakefront.

Have your fun with these images and post your versions to the comments and I’ll do my photoshop edits and post back in about a week.