How to Light Faces

3 Cinematic Lighting Setups

Could you imagine the efficiency of continually using the same light, the same light intensity, and the same light modifiers for every shoot? It would certainly save a lot of time during setup and get us straight into the action — and possibly back home before dusk. One can dream. However, as we have previously covered, lighting is also used to convey emotion and character; therefore, it’s not practical to repeat the same setup for every situation.

Although perhaps a more important aspect that dictates our lighting setup is the talent beneath it. As for each type of face, depending on the purpose of the scene, it can require slightly different lighting than the next face. As age, gender, and skin color, will all play a factor in how the light is reflected upon hitting the skin’s surface.

Today in Aputure’s Four Minute Film School, Director of Photography Valentina Vee with guest DOP Kevin Reyes cover precisely that with three setups. Each scene will be filmed in the same location, a luxury Los Angeles apartment, and all scenes will be set at night. (If you’re an eagle-eyed viewer, you may note it’s the same apartment from our previous tutorial.) Shooting at night and using the likes of an 85mm lens on the C70, we’re aiming to get some beautiful soft bokeh from surrounding skyscraper lights.

However, each scene will be inherently different from the next. We’ll be shooting a fashion scene, a beauty scene, and a black and white liquor ad. Importantly, each model used is of a different race, age, and gender. In this article, we’re not so much going to run through the step-by-step process of setting up these shots, but more of the methodology behind the choices when lighting each face. Let’s take a look.

Fashion Scene

In our first premise, we’re setting up a fashion shoot to showcase the model’s outfit. The talent is a young black male, and with that, we’re going to focus on two elements; the type of light being used and the makeup.

First, we made sure our makeup artist gave the talent a dewy complexion with highlight contouring.

Dewy; a person’s skin appearing soft and lustrous. (I had to look that up too).

This is because when filming people with darker skin, Valentina likes to create specular highlights. (This term denotes a bright spot from the light). With darker skin, you can easily create specular highlights that would typically require more intense lighting if filming someone with paler skin.

However, when adding specular highlights to a model’s face, you want that fall off (the spread of the highlight) to be short. If you create too large of a specular highlight, it is simply going to be distracting.

Unconventionally, we’re going to [key] light our model with a hard light. This is because darker skin absorbs light more efficiently, and using hard light will extenuate the details on the model’s skin, or in this case, the makeup.

We’ve previously discussed hard light and soft light, and you may recognize that using hard light for a beauty setup isn’t standard practice. However, with a fashion shoot, which is somewhat different than a beauty shoot, you don’t have to adhere to regular practices. As a result, there’s more creative liberty.

As a daylight-balanced source will illuminate our model (an Aputure LS 600d Pro), and because his attire is of cool colors, we need to also add dimension to the scene. We can do that by illuminating the background with a color that contrasts the cool color palette. That being a warm orange (3200k).

Because there’s a color separation, it also now makes the audience’s attention more focused on the model presented in the foreground.

The Aputure LS 60x, which is bi-color, allows us to do just that with the tungsten-balanced setting. If you don’t have a bi-color balanced light, you can use CTB gel on a daylight balanced light to lower the 5600k output to 3200k.

With the key light, we want to control the amount of possible light spill, as there’s a lot of reflective surfaces within the apartment. To do that, we’re going to attach the F10 Fresnel to maintain the spot and spread of the light. However, as noted by Valentina, on set, she wanted the bokeh from the skyscrapers in the background to be more apparent but increasing the ISO (as we were already at our widest aperture) makes the talent overexposed.

We could remove the Fresnel to lessen the directed intensity, but now the specular highlights are too dominant (which we spoke of earlier).

Unfortunately, at this point, we need to swap lights. Even when you have pre-planned your setup with lighting diagrams and storyboards, sometimes it just doesn’t work out on set. That’s ok. Take five and reconfigure your plan.

On location, we also had the less intensive Aputure LS 300d with an Aputure Fresnel X2 attachment. Using this, we could stop clipping on the specular highlights and alsoincrease the ISO to bring the bokeh out of the shadows.

This is the final result:

Key takeaways:

· Use makeup to underscore specular highlights.

· You can switch to hard light as darker skin absorbs more light.

· Hard light will also help extenuate the details of the skin.

Beauty Scene

Switching over to the beauty scene and the lighting setup will be inherently different to accommodate both the female face and the aesthetic found throughout the beauty industry. Our talent in this scene is a young Asian woman, and she is holding the cosmetic item that we are fictionally advertising.

First, a founding element of beauty commercials is soft light. We’re using an Aputure Nova PC300c at 5600k. The panels themselves are inherently soft, so if you’ve caught the video, you might wonder why we’re also adding a DOP Choice Snapbag Octa with a magic cloth to the Nova.

Well, as noted in our previous blog post, the larger the light source, the softer the light. Therefore, we can further soften an already soft light source, by using a large softbox to increase its size.

In general, the female face is a lot softer and more rounded than a man’s face. We want to compliment that with the lighting, and you can do so by making sure that the diffusion modifier is of circular design. With a circular softbox, it will wrap the light around the subject and highlight the smooth features with minimal shadow.

Additionally, a circular designed softbox will create a circular eye light. If we were to use the Nova without any modifiers, the square eye light would create an unbalanced outline within our composition that is filled with circular shapes.

Kevin noticed that the key light had the model's chin fall into darkness because we had positioned the key quite high in our setup. And with a beauty spot, you ideally want everything to be evenly illuminated. To counter this, we placed a 4x4 bounce board beneath the talent.

You can really see the difference with not having the bounce board in play!

This was the final result:

Key takeaways:

· Use soft light.

· Avoid shadows.

· Circular modifiers.

Liquor Advert

For our final shot, we’ve formulated the premise around shooting a commercial for a liquor brand. It’s high class, so to stay fancy, we’re gunning with a black and white grade. Additionally, our talent is an older white gentleman. Therefore, we have several things to consider when lighting for his face.

First, like our first male model, we’re going to use hard light, but this time not to create specular highlights, but to extenuate the texture in the model’s faces. With a key light positioned relatively high (an Aputure LS 60D + 1/2 CTO on a boom arm reaching over the counter), we can highlight the creases from aged skin. In our case, this helps promote the idea of wisdom and grandeur, and you should really listen to this guy if he’s recommending you a drink.

Now, let’s shift focus to the black and white element. You might at first think, why have you added CTO gel to light when you plan on converting the image to black and white? What does a color grade have to do with lighting the face? Well, first, the color temperature of your lights can have a vastly different effect on the outcome.

Different color temperatures will directly affect the tonality of the black and white conversion. If you quickly open Adobe Lightroom and change one of your photos to black and white, then slide the color temperature slider left to right, you’ll see the black and white image vastly alter with the slider adjustment.

This also correlates with makeup, and it’s why we had our makeup slightly darken our talents skin in specific areas.

In black and white movies, the makeup artist would overly extenuate all of the features with highlights and contours. If you were to walk onto set, the talent would likely look as if they have been pulled through the wringer, but through the filtration of the black and white film stock, the makeup creates additional contrast that would have been impossible to generate when filming in color. The same principle applies when digitally filming in black and white.

After adding a kicker and a 3200k practical light to bring the background out from the darkness, this is the final result.

Key takeaways:

· Use hard light to extenuate facial features.

· Position the light a few degrees out from 90 degrees.

· Use makeup to add further contrast to the black and white grade.

Be sure to check out the entire Four Minute Film School playlist on Aputure’s Official YouTube channel, and stay creative.