Take backlight portrait photography

Backlight portrait many people like, canvas prints but to tell the truth can take the picture is not very clear. Most people are either shot as a silhouette, or shot a pale, or shoot paste. Of course, in addition to the photographer's subjective intention, the portrait shot clearly should be the basic requirements of whether the backlight portrait is qualified.

First of all, print on canvas it should be explained that backlight is such a large light ratio environment, I still recommend the technique of reducing the light ratio at the early stage to shoot, so that the photos come out with the best texture and distinct layers. For most hobbyists, having an assistant to fix your lights is unrealistic. Or a daily photo shoots of a family outing. So in this case, the late dafa is particularly important.

Second, although this article is written in the late dafa, large canvas but it does not mean that the early is not important. On the contrary, prophase is very important. There are a lot of mistakes that are very, very easy to make in backlighting scenes, and even the later ones won't save you. Therefore, the premise of the post-production method is to choose the right way to shoot the early material according to the later demand. Finally, the late dafa, as the name suggests, the main work and energy into the film in the late. Use RAW's tolerance to get the most out of highlights and shadows in photos. Let me tell you how to do it.

Precautions for early backlight shooting:

1. Try to avoid shooting at the light source. In other words, the sun should not be placed in the center of the picture. It is better not to see the sun in the picture. If you really want to include the sun in the picture, please place it at the edge. The reason for this is that the direct sunlight on the lens is easy to produce glare, the whole picture is a vast expanse of whiteness. That's why so many people get a blurry picture when they're clearly exposed and focused. For example:

Sun-shot lenses are prone to glare, and the longer the focal length, the easier the glare. Avoid this. Of course, it is not impossible to bring in the sun. You can use some shade, such as the sunlight through the leaves, or the sunlight through the tall buildings in the distant mountains, so as to effectively reduce the impact of glare. Or the light source is far away from the center of the picture, using a shorter focal length lens shooting, is a way. (Be grateful to the brothers in the group who provide negative material.) In addition, it is difficult to focus the lens in direct sunlight, and manual focusing is the only way.

2. Use the environment to change the point light source into a surface light source. Point light sources are prone to glare, but surface light sources are not. So according to this feature can be more use of the surrounding environment so that the point light source into a surface light source. For example indoor can white curtain the sunshine outside the window is soft become face illuminant, have or lest the vitreous wall that grinds erinaceous also very easy to let dot illuminant convert face. Or use the reflection of the water, in short, as long as the good observation and thinking, you can always find the right way. It doesn't matter if you can't find it; you can still take a good photo according to the first rule.

3, rather owe do not expose. In the RAW format of today's digital cameras, it is common to see less detail in highlights than in shadows. That is to say, the highlights are hard to get back through the post, but the shadows are easy to get through the post and keep enough detail.

Late method:

What follows is the show time of dafa in the later stage. However, it should be emphasized again before this. It is the best solution for backlighting portrait to fill the light in the early stage, and dafa in the later stage is a helpless act without filling the light.

1. Principles this is actually a way of using RAW's tolerance to retrieve highlight and shadow details. So the premise of this approach must be to shoot in RAW format and be familiar with your camera's tolerance range. For example, the ancestral CMOS of a toothpaste factory is not bad if it wants to use this method to modify the picture, but please try not to make too heavy adjustment, because if the high-light shadow is too fierce, it will be full of color noise and moving. So later on the light ratio adjustment degree, in fact, is to rely on your own machine performance to determine. But this degree is needs the massive photography and the post-production to practice comes out. In this paper, I choose a photo taken by A7S as a case study. The reason why I choose A7S is that it is absolutely the most tolerant camera that I have ever used and the RAW material that can withstand the test of post production. Highlight shadow exposure slider can enjoy the pull, post - retouching dripping.

In terms of software, I use Lightroom, but actually it is not necessary to use Lightroom. As long as I master the principles, no matter it is Photoshop, capture one, or any other software that can solve RAW, I can do it. There are no hard and fast requirements, the key is to master the principle of retouching images.

Before I do that, let's look at the comparison. Look at some of the features of the original image: the sun is centered, the sun is blocked by clouds, the wide Angle of 28 degrees, and the unexposed original image. These are the cautions for the backlight portrait shooting I mentioned before.

(1) Retrieve the shadow details. Using the child's reference modifier, the details of the shadow are retrieved by adjusting the exposure and shadow.

But simply adjusting the exposure and shading can make the image appear "grey" because the shading details are highlighted too much. Therefore, we need to lower the black level to ensure the color level of the picture, that is, to make the picture more transparent. If you know how to look at the histogram, you can pay attention to the left side of the histogram. So we need to lower the black level so that the left side of the histogram is also filled with enough black levels.

Take a look at the adjusted photos. This is very important, many people feel that how to fix their photos is not transparent, basically due to the lack of enough black color level caused by, will lead to the whole picture color level is not rich enough, appear "gray"!

(2) Retrieve highlight details. The overblown clouds are first lowered by lowering the highlights and white levels.

(3) Detail adjustment. Through the above two steps, the highlights and shadow details have been basically recovered, but some details are not perfect, for example, the baby's face will be pulled down to the overall exposure when the highlights are pressed, and will change back to the underexposed appearance. So you can choose the brush out of the child's body, local exposure adjustment.

(4) Color temperature adjustment. In order to foil the overall golden sunshine atmosphere, so improve color temperature, increase saturation, brightness, wood frames for canvas prints get the following effect.

(5) Color refinement. Since I wanted the warm color to be a little more orange, I pulled down the yellow to make it redder and get the orange sunlight I wanted.