Your background is clipped to 255. 255 = pure light. Is your background made out of pure light?
We shoot on plain smooth backgrounds so the brain will tune it out and not be distracted by it. The background will look just as white perceptually, and tune it out just as quickly if exposed correctly in the technical scene, placing its tonal value around 250 in a 24-bit (8/color) JPG file.
When setting exposure I use a target like the one below with a textured white towel, which unlike smooth targets will reveal visually when detail is starting to be lost in the highlights. Preserving that detail is what defines a correct exposure. The MacBeth color target is useful for judging the effects of flare on saturation of color.
I\'ll start with the background lighting off, as above and adjust the foreground lighting until the brightest highlight on the foreground, such as the rim-light on the towel, is about 1/3 stop below clipping in the the over-exposure warning (OEW).
Why 1/3 stop? Because by doing a bracketed series of exposures previously and comparing what the camera OEW showed vs. when detail in the RAW file started to melt away I found the best exposure of the white towel - a proxy for highlight detail in clothing, eyes, teeth, etc. - was 1/3 stop below the point the camera playback started to show clipping.
Once I get the foreground zeroed in I raise the background lighting to the point where it starts to show clipping in the OEW, then back it down until the OEW warning disappears. The OEW reveals where clipping is occurring first so I can use it to guide light placement to make the lighting of the background as even as possible.
The background isn\'t captured in the camera as \"knock-out\" white (255) but rather ideally somewhere around 250.250.250. Note in the shot above that the rim lighting of the towel is still visible? That\'s something you need to grasp about the perceptual aspects of lighting on white backgrounds. To make the white highlights on the foreground subjects visible and do their important perceptual job creating the illusion of 3D via contrast its necessary to make the \"white\" of the background a slightly darker shade of white. If you go back and compare the rim lighting on the towel in the first shot, before the background lights were even turned on you\'ll note that when the background is darker the stuff in the foreground actually seems brighter perceptually. That\'s because the brain, while it will ignore the background detail by virtue of the fact the eye in person would render it out of focus will key off the background tone to \"anchor\" the tonal scale.
All of this advice flies in the face of conventional wisdom which says to over-expose the background by a stop to knock it out completely. But consider that if you over-expose the background by a stop you will be bouncing twice as much flare light back into to lens than if you expose the background below clipping. You\'ll find your foreground subjects are more saturated... Try it both ways and compare the results.
With regard to lighting your subject in the foreground, use butterfly for full face views. Full face is a symmetrical view of the face, so you need a complementary symmetrical lighting pattern to create natural downward modeling. Put one light directly over the camera lens above eye level, but not so high the brow begins to shade the eyes and the fill source below the lens.
That placement of the light will create a highlight down the center ridge of the nose and even shadows on either side, which creates the appearance of symmetry. If you cross lights horizontally they cancel each other and you get the opposite, a darker line or zone down the center of the face and unfilled areas where neither light reaches.
If you were to place one light to the side and the fill over the camera it would create a sideway shadow pattern which when overlapping the full face view would have the net effect of making the highlighted side bigger than the shadow side and the face look asymmetrical. The key-light-to-side \"short\" lighting pattern is more effective for oblique views on dark backgrounds...
Compare how that lighting models the face, vs the \"broad\" lighting from the other side...
But for an oblique view on white short lighting may not be effective. The goal is to make the face overall contrast with the background but also pull the attention of the viewer to the front of it. You can see in the examples above how the short lighting on the dark background does that by creating compelling contrast your eye can\'t resist. But put that same lighting pattern on a white background and the brightly lit far side of the face will disappear perceptually into the background. So instead the more effective strategy for oblique views on white backgrounds is broad lighting with light open shadows. Broad light will make the far side of the face slightly darker, allowing it to contrast well against the white background and an the same time make the side of the head facing the camera brighter and blend into the background perceptually. The net effect of the lighting pattering is a contrast gradient which pulls the attention of the viewer to the slightly darker far side: the same dynamic of eye movement as short lighting on a dark background.
Moving the eye of the viewer to what is most important with CONTRAST is what lighting patterns are all about. So when you are moving lights around try to understand the underlying goals of what the lights should be doing, to pull the viewer into the front of the face and model it in a way that looks slim and symmetrical with natural downward modeling of the nose and cheeks, no harsh shadows, and good light and a catchlight in both eyes.
The thing which isn\'t grasped immediately about white backgrounds is the fact that COLOR contrast of warm skin is often a stronger attractive than tonal contrast, especially if the subject is a blonde. If the subject has dark hair you\'ll notice the hair first, color contrast of the face second. If the subject is a blonde, it will be color contrast alone which pulls the eye into the face. That\'s why non-competing, non-distracting clothing is an important consideration on white backgrounds. Little girls are traditionally dressed in pink, but a pink dress will overpower the face. If the goal is to see the face use a white dress with a pink collar.
Click the WWW button and look in the TOC for tutorials on basic lighting configurations and why they work, and how to expose white background shots correctly perceptually.
Your background is clipped to 255. 255 = pure light. Is your background made out of pure light?
We shoot on plain smooth backgrounds so the brain will tune it out and not be distracted by it. The background will look just as white perceptually, and tune it out just as quickly if exposed correctly in the technical scene, placing its tonal value around 250 in a 24-bit (8/color) JPG file.
When setting exposure I use a target like the one below with a textured white towel, which unlike smooth targets will reveal visually when detail is starting to be lost in the highlights. Preserving that detail is what defines a correct exposure. The MacBeth color target is useful for judging the effects of flare on saturation of color.
I\'ll start with the background lighting off, as above and adjust the foreground lighting until the brightest highlight on the foreground, such as the rim-light on the towel, is about 1/3 stop below clipping in the the over-exposure warning (OEW).
Why 1/3 stop? Because by doing a bracketed series of exposures previously and comparing what the camera OEW showed vs. when detail in the RAW file started to melt away I found the best exposure of the white towel - a proxy for highlight detail in clothing, eyes, teeth, etc. - was 1/3 stop below the point the camera playback started to show clipping.
Once I get the foreground zeroed in I raise the background lighting to the point where it starts to show clipping in the OEW, then back it down until the OEW warning disappears. The OEW reveals where clipping is occurring first so I can use it to guide light placement to make the lighting of the background as even as possible.
The background isn\'t captured in the camera as \"knock-out\" white (255) but rather ideally somewhere around 250.250.250. Note in the shot above that the rim lighting of the towel is still visible? That\'s something you need to grasp about the perceptual aspects of lighting on white backgrounds. To make the white highlights on the foreground subjects visible and do their important perceptual job creating the illusion of 3D via contrast its necessary to make the \"white\" of the background a slightly darker shade of white. If you go back and compare the rim lighting on the towel in the first shot, before the background lights were even turned on you\'ll note that when the background is darker the stuff in the foreground actually seems brighter perceptually. That\'s because the brain, while it will ignore the background detail by virtue of the fact the eye in person would render it out of focus will key off the background tone to \"anchor\" the tonal scale.
All of this advice flies in the face of conventional wisdom which says to over-expose the background by a stop to knock it out completely. But consider that if you over-expose the background by a stop you will be bouncing twice as much flare light back into to lens than if you expose the background below clipping. You\'ll find your foreground subjects are more saturated... Try it both ways and compare the results.
With regard to lighting your subject in the foreground, use butterfly for full face views. Full face is a symmetrical view of the face, so you need a complementary symmetrical lighting pattern to create natural downward modeling. Put one light directly over the camera lens above eye level, but not so high the brow begins to shade the eyes and the fill source below the lens.
That placement of the light will create a highlight down the center ridge of the nose and even shadows on either side, which creates the appearance of symmetry. If you cross lights horizontally they cancel each other and you get the opposite, a darker line or zone down the center of the face and unfilled areas where neither light reaches.
If you were to place one light to the side and the fill over the camera it would create a sideway shadow pattern which when overlapping the full face view would have the net effect of making the highlighted side bigger than the shadow side and the face look asymmetrical. The key-light-to-side \"short\" lighting pattern is more effective for oblique views on dark backgrounds...
Compare how that lighting models the face, vs the \"broad\" lighting from the other side...
So when you are moving lights around try to understand the underlying goals of what the lights should be doing, to pull the viewer into the front of the face and model it in a way that looks slim and symmetrical with natural downward modeling of the nose and cheeks, no harsh shadows, and good light and a catchlight in both eyes.
Click the WWW button and look in the TOC for tutorials on basic lighting configurations and why they work, and how to expose white background shots correctly perceptually.
