I can't seem to get open shade to "work"

[SCoombs]

I hope this is a good place to post this topic; I thought about several including the Beginner's forum but I am definitely not qualify as a beginner and when I post there I tend to get answers that miss the real point of the question and assume I don't know how aperture works or something

I have read and watched dozens of things about using open shade, and frankly they all say almost exactly the same thing, I assume because the concept doesn't seem to be all that complicated for there to be multiple takes or nuances for difference pieces to get into.

Yet there has to be something more to it than everything gets into because I just can't seem to employ the idea successfully.

Some background: one problem I have when shooting in natural light is getting skin tones which are lacking in good, natural color and look not really ghostlike but definitely what one might call a bit washed. Here's a photo of mine which has decent tones in the face and looks the way this person actually looks when you see her in life:



Here's another with a slightly different quality of light, to get the idea:



On the other hand, here's a one with the sort of tones I get more than half the time when shooting in natural light:



Now this is from a relatively dreary winter day and so the more washed look makes some sense here, but honestly this was after a lot of work to fix the tones and I still think it has a certain quality to it that amounts to a a lot of bland white with splotches of red and frankly I went ahead and stylized the rest of the photo to try to make the overall thing make sense with the way her face looked and it would stand out a lot more otherwise.

Here's another that really shows what I get a lot of the time - first the original, and then after working on it:





The original is very flat and colorless in the face. The edit is better, but it exemplifies what happens with almost every one of these photos: even if I spend hours on a single image the best I can do is something which is more colorful but overly orange or otherwise saturated with slightly off colors. I think the problem is that there just isn't enough natural color in the original to bring up and so I am essentially trying to add colors back that aren't there in the first place.

After personal reflection and asking advice of more experienced photographers one of the main diagnoses I have for this skin tone problem is that I am frequently shooting either on sunny days with subjects deep in the shade and so not they aren't getting a good quality of light on them to bring out their color - essentially, the colors are being "naturally underexposed," OR they are being shot in flatter, overcast light which has the twin effect of overemphasizing the highlights in a person's skin and making things look too flat, also resulting in bland and washed out colors.

That's a longer preface than I intended, but this brings me to open shade. I realize that open shade is not the only thing to do to deal with this issue (feel free to suggest others), but it's certainly one way to try to get better lighting on people in both of these general cases. The problem is that I cannot get open shade to "act" like anything other than regular deep shade.

Everything I have seen talks about open shade this way: find a place where there is a sharp cutoff between the lit and unlit area. On a sunny day, you can just find the line on the ground where you have sunlight on one side and shade on the other. Put the person just in the shade and face them out in the direction where the light is coming from. The light should generally be a large open area of light.

That's it. That's all everything says to do, and it is presented as a very straightforward, very easy thing to do. My results? always just like the example: overly shaded, no colors to speak of in the skin. Here is an photo I took for no reason other than to demonstrate what I am talking about:







Look at the legs of the toy and the bottom of the skirt and you can literally see the line of sunlight - that's how close she is to the edge. I had her stand so her face was in the sunlight and then take one step back. In front of her is literally nothing but sunlight, along with a big open sky.

Behind her is the shade. I have had one (very skilled) photographer look at the sunny area in the distance and tell that the problem here is that behind her is brighter than what she is looking into, but that doesn't make sense to me because what she is looking into is entirely sunny and warm and bright while behind her is hundreds of feet of shade. If I turned her around and we walked all the way down to that other line of sunlight and had her face that way, then she'd have the bright, bright sunlight she is currently looking into that same distance behind her and the situation would be the same.

I was also trying to expose for her face here, not meter for the background light. The issue isn't per se the luminance - I can easily bring the luminance of her face up with this RAW file and get what looks well exposed, and I took some shots with greater exposure so she was naturally brighter - but it's that the quality of light leaves her face without much depth of natural color that I see in so many "open shade" and other natural light photos.

Thanks for sticking with me this far. Please understand that the example I have posted here is just one example. I had already tried using open shade many times without success before I set out to take this one just so I had an example to demonstrate. In any case, I'd appreciate thoughts and advice.

 

[A-Marc]

i am german, and english isnt my natual language thats why my answers are short...

1st. light picks up color. this means that when you place the subject under a tree in summer, you will end up with greenish light on your subject. a brick wall will bounce back in red. a red jacket will also bounce back. i think you get the idea. to get better WB than the auto setting, you would need to take a ref shot of a color chart like a xrite color checker pasport. and do a custom WB in post for each lightning scenario you shot.

2nd. often people mix color with tonality. if you look at color its very hard to determine the tonality.

. so you might see that there is shade, but i actually can be brigter than your subject. to overcome this problem you could set your camera to B&W, and shoot raw. this way you will still get color in your raws, just the preview jpeg in your camera will be B&W. this way you can see tonality in your EVF. one way to get open shade to work, is to train it in a open door, or a open garage, where you def have a darker background.

3rd. is related with 2nd. when you edit, you can first turn down all the saturation. than do your edits for the tonal value, so to say, just edit the contrast in your shot. if you use the RGB curve, you will automatically edit saturation as well. if you use a luma curve, you just edit tonality. than bring back the saturation slider to a value that is acceptable to your eye.

 

[Ed Shapiro]

I hope this is a good place to post this topic; I thought about several including the Beginner's forum but I am definitely not qualify as a beginner and when I post there I tend to get answers that miss the real point of the question and assume I don't know how aperture works or something

I have read and watched dozens of things about using open shade, and frankly they all say almost exactly the same thing, I assume because the concept doesn't seem to be all that complicated for there to be multiple takes or nuances for difference pieces to get into.

Yet there has to be something more to it than everything gets into because I just can't seem to employ the idea successfully.

Some background: one problem I have when shooting in natural light is getting skin tones which are lacking in good, natural color and look not really ghostlike but definitely what one might call a bit washed. Here's a photo of mine which has decent tones in the face and looks the way this person actually looks when you see her in life:

Here's another with a slightly different quality of light, to get the idea:

On the other hand, here's a one with the sort of tones I get more than half the time when shooting in natural light:

Now this is from a relatively dreary winter day and so the more washed look makes some sense here, but honestly this was after a lot of work to fix the tones and I still think it has a certain quality to it that amounts to a a lot of bland white with splotches of red and frankly I went ahead and stylized the rest of the photo to try to make the overall thing make sense with the way her face looked and it would stand out a lot more otherwise.

Here's another that really shows what I get a lot of the time - first the original, and then after working on it:

The original is very flat and colorless in the face. The edit is better, but it exemplifies what happens with almost every one of these photos: even if I spend hours on a single image the best I can do is something which is more colorful but overly orange or otherwise saturated with slightly off colors. I think the problem is that there just isn't enough natural color in the original to bring up and so I am essentially trying to add colors back that aren't there in the first place.

After personal reflection and asking advice of more experienced photographers one of the main diagnoses I have for this skin tone problem is that I am frequently shooting either on sunny days with subjects deep in the shade and so not they aren't getting a good quality of light on them to bring out their color - essentially, the colors are being "naturally underexposed," OR they are being shot in flatter, overcast light which has the twin effect of overemphasizing the highlights in a person's skin and making things look too flat, also resulting in bland and washed out colors.

That's a longer preface than I intended, but this brings me to open shade. I realize that open shade is not the only thing to do to deal with this issue (feel free to suggest others), but it's certainly one way to try to get better lighting on people in both of these general cases. The problem is that I cannot get open shade to "act" like anything other than regular deep shade.
Everything I have seen talks about open shade this way: find a place where there is a sharp cutoff between the lit and unlit area. On a sunny day, you can just find the line on the ground where you have sunlight on one side and shade on the other. Put the person just in the shade and face them out in the direction where the light is coming from. The light should generally be a large open area of light.
That's it. That's all everything says to do, and it is presented as a very straightforward, very easy thing to do. My results? always just like the example: overly shaded, no colors to speak of in the skin. Here is an photo I took for no reason other than to demonstrate what I am talking about:

Look at the legs of the toy and the bottom of the skirt and you can literally see the line of sunlight - that's how close she is to the edge. I had her stand so her face was in the sunlight and then take one step back. In front of her is literally nothing but sunlight, along with a big open sky.
Behind her is the shade. I have had one (very skilled) photographer look at the sunny area in the distance and tell that the problem here is that behind her is brighter than what she is looking into, but that doesn't make sense to me because what she is looking into is entirely sunny and warm and bright while behind her is hundreds of feet of shade. If I turned her around and we walked all the way down to that other line of sunlight and had her face that way, then she'd have the bright, bright sunlight she is currently looking into that same distance behind her and the situation would be the same.
I was also trying to expose for her face here, not meter for the background light. The issue isn't per se the luminance - I can easily bring the luminance of her face up with this RAW file and get what looks well exposed, and I took some shots with greater exposure so she was naturally brighter - but it's that the quality of light leaves her face without much depth of natural color that I see in so many "open shade" and other natural light photos.

Thanks for sticking with me this far. Please understand that the example I have posted here is just one example. I had already tried using open shade many times without success before I set out to take this one just so I had an example to demonstrate. In any case, I'd appreciate your thoughts and advice.

For portraiture in natural light, you may want to consider the plication of additive and subtractive lighting methods to have better control modeling, skin tone, ratio, and background management. The equipment required is inexpensive and simple, basically a few reflectors and GOBOS (black flags or disks)

When you are working in open shad, cloudy-bright, or overcast conditions, the ligh is soft but it is striking the subject from all directions or worse, directly overhead. You lose the direction of ligh that enables modeling and dimensionality. If the light is coming directly overhead, it will fail to illuminate the eyes and rear sockets causing "raccoon"- like shadows, and will lack catchlights and shadow detail in the eyes.

The method entails using the black GOBOS the shade on one side of the subject and sometimes the light coming from overhead the remaining highlights from in one direction of light- it's called UNITY of lighting as opposed to a disunity for omnidirectional sources. It's as if you were working in a studio where you can move the lights around to create a particular pattern or form EXCEPT you are moving the subject into the existing ligh and modifying it. If the is insufficient light to create the lighing you are trying to establish, a REFLECTOR can be employed to pump more directional light.

Skin tone- Correct exposure and white balce should yield a decent skin tone rendition. Back in the film days, we selected films and papers on various degrees of warmth, coolness, or neutrality. Portrt films and some papers were skin tone biased - they tend to produce warmer skin toes, oftentimes at the expense of saturating foliage, etc. In digital imaging, we can customize a white balance to our taste, use the camera's menu to set it to a "portrat" mode which may tend to be warmer, or simply adjust post-processing.

Background management. If you employ the additive/subtractive methd, you will have more choices of where you can place your subject in relation to the background. You can opt for a less distracting, darker background, or a brighter one for a high-key effect, The trick is to establish a ratio between the subject and the background. If you expose for the skin tone and there is less light in the background it will go darker. You cannot shade an entire landscape but if ypu pump more light into the subject you can bring the background down to a more manageable level.

Very bright sunlight is difficult to manage, especially at and around noon. As the sun began to set, the light became more directional, and the shadows could be filled in with a reflector. Late afternoon sunlight is lower in color temperature and will yield a warmer skin tone.

I am the current moderator of the Studio and Lighting section. I can be found there most days when I am not working. I can work up a few diagrams and resource materials for you. Post a brief reminder there and I'll put something together for you in a couple of days.

Ed Shapiro- Commercial and Portrait Photographer. Ottawa, Ontario Canada

 

[ibbz]

As the other guys said especially about light reflecting

You could spot meter off the face then bracket your shots

use a warm up filter