Studio light without studio lights

[Sheriffautlan]

Final result:



Using only curves, and noiseware professional!

[zona5101]

nice work!

[noreen23]

hm, good to know we can do this. this is exactly what i was looking for. i will try it for my daughter's pictures. thanks for sharing..

[Sheriffautlan]

Thanks for ur comments!

[elkidogz]

I liked the pics on the flickr account. TFS

[nategesner]

You say this is "without studio lights" so could you please share what you used for lighting, how they were positioned, etc.?

[Sheriffautlan]

Shure, just one thing... My english is very very bad, ill try to do my best.

Setup for the shot was very easy, it wasn't planed at all, we were working on a party (we are musicians) then i just tookthis pic.

Fairly white wall, and a semi-closed roof, reflecting the light on the floor.

I used a mask, only for the skin, selecting carefully, then apply curves using the "auto" button.
It fix skin tone in color fairly well some times.
Then, duplicate this curves layer, and invert the mask, so now is affecting background.
Now u can work slightly on the skin curves adjust layer, and background curves.

Use a new curves layer, to fix overall contrast.

If something is overexposed, duplicate background, en aply "shadow - highlights", turn on the "show me more options".

Change amount of shadows recovery to zero.
Raise "highlights" radius to something between 100 and 170. Then play with Hightlights "amount" and watch how many details u can recover on the overexposed areas.

once u've got a good result, then mask those areas smoothly, with a soft low opacity brush, if it changes ur image colors (some times it makes red ugly) then, put the layer in "luminosity" mode, but dont forget to use a mask.

And i think that's all i did here! Hope u understand this!

[wesingit]

what program did you use to do it with i have paint shop pro is there something different you would recommend?

[Sheriffautlan]

well... i use photoshop, all the time... dont know about other software really!

[Vagebond]

Originally Posted by wesingit

what program did you use to do it with i have paint shop pro is there something different you would recommend?

Paint Shop Pro has "adjustment layers" too, including curves, and mask layers, so this can be done in PSP pretty much as described here.