Hard light in the background can have the opposite effect. The main reason I shoot with soft light in my backgrounds as much as I do is because it helps me keep a muted tone in an image and it allows the subject to pop. Here’s a stupid GIF of me to keep you entertained. Hot dang, that was a lot of technical mumbo jumbo. You can hover over the image below to can see the exact settings and the difference they made on the image. So dang easy! The only other thing I did in the in the HSL for this image is to bring down the luminance on the blues/aquas to darken the sky just a tad. To subdue those colors a bit (bringing them closer to how they would look in soft light), you can simply drag down the saturation for each specific color you feel is too strong. When shooting outdoors with hard light in the background, you’ll likely be seeing strong greens, yellows and oranges taking over your image. The HSL slider is something I’ve rarely dug into when I’m working on images with softer light but it can be crucial for taming the bonkers colors that hard light can give you. For example, I could change the blues in the image (make them a different color, add/kill saturation, or change the brightness of them) without affecting any other color in the frame. This panel allows you to manipulate three things about each specific color: the hue, saturation, and luminance. If you don’t know where that is, it’s the super confusing looking patchwork of sliders under the Tone Curve in Lightroom. This is where the glorious HSL tool comes into play. Why does this matter? If I want to keep my images in hard and soft light consistent with each other, I have to understand how to manipulate that saturation. Move it into the sun and it turns into a freaking neon blaze of green hell fire. If you look at a blade of grass in the shade, you’ll see a soft, peaceful green. Tones! Woohoo! If you’ve shot in both, you may have already realized that one of the biggest differences in soft/hard light is saturation. It’s always best to err on the side of underexposure (unless you’re shooting film). When shooting digital, if you blow something out, it’s gone forever. On the other hand, if I exposed for the skin, I would have kept details there but would have blown out the sky. That left the skin much darker, but that’s okay because we can bring that up in post without losing details. Did you follow that? In this shot, I wanted to keep detail in the sky and the skin (I wanted to keep some blue sky) and since the sky was brighter, I underexposed that. I underexpose the brightest thing I want to keep detail in. Other than that, I let the hard light takeover.Įxposing shots like this is the same as I’d expose anything else. The sun was coming through a small circular diffuser on her right (your left) which shaded the top half of her body. In the images above, I wanted to keep that softness in my subject while playing with harder light in the background. That’s very important to my style since my tends to have a softer (although still contrasty) feel. My typical images have soft light on both the subjects and the backgrounds. Editing for hard light and soft light is a completely different ball game. The type of light you work with is one of the most influential factors on your editing. Let’s start with what we should always focus on first, the light. Well guess what friends… experimentation fosters progression and lately I’ve been experimenting in harder light! You know I search for shade and you know that back light gets me giddy. If you know my work, you know how much I love soft light. This isn’t “Hard Light” but it’s modified hard light ( I had a diffuser blocking the sun from her top half) and the background is in hard light. It’s a monster with hard shadows, distracting backgrounds, and strong colors. If you’re just here for the freebies, enjoy the article! If you want to dig in way further, I cover every step of my post processing in my Editing + Consistency class. To satisfy those of you who are like me, here’s another post in my Before/After series which not only shows you my images straight out of camera and the final product (hover over the image to see the before), but which uses each image to explain a bit more about what I do in post. I’ve always loved peeking behind the scenes to see where something started and what kind of work and thought went into creating the finished product. Ever since the middle of high school, I’ve been immensely interested in “the process.” You know, that middle bit between point A and point B that nobody but the artist ever sees.
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