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LIGHTING STRATEGIES: Soft Light vs. Hard Light

Hard lights are great for textures, but soft lights are great for defining spaces.

By Art Adams | December 21, 2011

In a previous article I described how to place a hard key light. In this article I'll look at why soft sources are a bit more realistic in color cinematography, require less precise placement, and can help define the volume of a space.

In my last article we talked about how to light faces: where shadows should fall for "classical" modeling and what to look for when struggling to create a classical portrait of someone who has a non-classical facial structure.

In this article we're going to talk about soft light, the most forgiving light we'll ever use on a face. This doesn't mean that we should always use it--the story and emotion driving the project you're shooting should guide you in your lighting strategy--but soft light is most forgiving of facial oddities. It's also a style that we easily accept because, in the real world, any setting that is not lit by direct sun is usually lit by some sort of bounced or diffused light.

Hard light works wonderfully in black-and-white filmmaking because the medium is already a bit abstract: hard shadows play better when the image is one step removed from reality, and the lack of color certainly creates a different world for the viewer. Hard shadows also reveal textures well, and our eyes love texture. Soft light, though, generally plays better in color because it's closer to how we see the world. Hard light can look fake in color photography because multiple hard sources can make a space feel "lit": the quality of the light is not what we'd expect in that environment, and that pulls us out of the story. There are exceptions to this (the first three Raiders of the Lost Ark films are great examples) but it takes a lot of practice and a good eye to get away with hard light in color cinematography.

But enough about theory. Let's look at some virtual faces, created in Poser 9:



In my last article I presented this image as an example of classical Rembrandt modeling with hard light. The trick with hard light, though, is that it is quite face dependent. What works on one face may not work on another:



This example isn't as bad as it could be because Poser doesn't supply me with challenging facial models. As you can see, though, her face looks very different from his. His lighting makes him look ruggedly handsome whereas hers is acceptable, but maybe not optimal.



This is what happens when I diffuse the key light significantly. This look is reminiscent of what might happen if I placed a frame of Lee 129 (a very dense diffusion material) two to three feet to the side of his face, between him and the lamp. The camera right side gets all the light, but the camera left side gets only a little bit of the light. If you look in his eyes you can see the soft key strongly in his camera right eye but very weakly in the left one. You can also see the fill light I placed near the virtual camera as a pinpoint in both eyes.

Let's see what happens to his female counterpart under the same lighting:



Wow, that's beautiful.

There are three key differences that I see between hard light and soft light:

(1) Hard light creates hard shadows that enhance defects and create very dramatic modeling on a face, whereas soft light's broader gradations conceal facial blemishes and don't have to be placed as precisely because they aren't as distinct.

(2) Hard light usually creates two tones on a face: a bright side and a dark side. Soft light creates an almost infinite number of tones in the transition between the key side and the fill side, and our eyes like tonal complexity.

(3) Soft light comes from a source that's large in relation to the subject. As healthy skin has a little bit of shine to it the source will reflect in the skin, adding a very soft but beautiful highlight. Hard lights will not do this unless the face is very, very shiny, and even then the highlight will be a small one.


Putting diffusion material between the light and the subject doesn't automatically soften it. The size of the diffusion and how close or far it is from the subject make all the difference. When you diffuse or bounce light the lamp itself is no longer lighting the subject; rather, it is lighting the diffusion or bounce card, which is glowing and lighting the subject with the light that it is emanating. The lamp makes the diffusion or bounce surface bright, and that radiating brightness lights the subject.

The softness of a light on a subject depends on how big that light source is in relation to the subject. For example, a 4'x4' frame of Lee 129 diffusion placed 3'-4' from a person's face will create very soft shadows, whereas the same frame placed 30' away will cast very hard shadows. From the subject's perspective the close frame will appear to be a huge source, while the far one will be very small.

The example above shows what happens when the diffusion is placed to the side of a face. Let's see what happens when we bring it to the front of the face, closer to camera but still to one side:



This, too, is a very interesting look. The shadow on the camera right side of his face near his ear is interesting but won't happen in real life; it's a side effect of how Poser renders light and has no bearing on reality. The rest, though, is very realistic. Note how the nose shadow is minimized but still gives the nose shape due to the high contrast of its decreased shadow. That shadow isn't hard and harsh but soft with a lot of gradation over a short distance. The front surfaces of his face reflect the large source and appear to glow: I see this in his forehead, just above his smile lines and on his lips. This effect is exaggerated here by the software but you should see some of this every time you use a soft source close to a person's face.



She looks great as well. Notice how soft the highlight from the key light is in her eyes. The larger the source the less bright any part of it will be, so it creates a larger but dimmer eyelight. This is why an intentional eye light is usually created using small, dim, specular sources, but that's a subject for a future article.

Let's move the light dead on:



This is classic beauty lighting, although on a man it doesn't feel as glamorous as it does on a woman. The light is coming straight down the axis of the lens. If I were to do this with physical lights I would cut a hole in a 4'x4' piece of foam core, stick the lens through it, and then light the front of the foam core as evenly as I could with two lights, one from either side. Placing the camera and the rig about 4' away from the subject will produce this look, where the center of the face gets all the light from the card but the sides of the face receive less light as they curve away from the opposite side of the bounce card.

The look is similar to that of a ring light, although a ring light is smaller and casts sharper shadows for a more dramatic look.

This look can also be accomplished by placing two 4'x4' Kino Flos horizontally on either side of the lens, exactly at the lens height and as close to the lens as possible. The look isn't exactly the same but it's similar.

Here's what this setup looks like on a woman:



This is an idealized face lit with an idealized light, but you've seen this look in a hundred makeup and fashion commercials. The center of the face appears to glow due to the soft reflected highlight of the source while the sides drop off because they only receive light from one side of the source and are blocked from the other.

I've found that building a source that's as wide as the distance to the subject works best at achieving this look. If the subject is 8' away from the camera I'll build an 8' wide by 4' high source. (For this look the width of the light is more important than the height. More on light shape in a future article.)

Let's look at soft lighting from below the lens and using soft light to define spaces on the next page...

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Comments

Art Adams: | December, 23, 2011

The fill light article is coming, probably next month. smile

I, personally, hate the terms “key” and “fill” because film schools have made them loaded terms. “Key” is supposed to be the light that shapes the set and gives it mood, but it’s not unusual to have multiple lights that have that feeling, or none. “Fill” makes a little more sense to me as it makes sense that you’d want to control the depth of your shadows, but fill can also have shape to it and can either cover the set or be localized to certain areas of the set.

If I taught a class in lighting I would eliminate the word “key” from the curriculum because I think it makes lighting too formulaic. The key doesn’t have to be harder, softer, more directional, less directional than the fill… all I can really say accurately is that it is traditionally brighter than the fill light. Other than that there are no rules.

In a set there are lights that are brighter than others that sculpt the space, and there’s usually some sort of light that makes the shadows as dark or as bright as you want them. That’s about it. The rest is up to your imagination. No light has to be harder or softer than another by definition, it simply has to look right to you and suit the director’s story.

I hope to write an article soon about a project I just shot for OnLive where I don’t think I can point to any setup and say “here’s the key light.” There’s “soft but directional back light from the window,” there’s “sunlight raking through the set,” but there’s not really a single light that I would define as a “key.” That’s not the way I think anymore, and I’m a better cinematographer for it.

And don’t get me started about lighting ratios. smile I think those are some of the most useless things ever. For example, if I lit a set to a 4:1 ratio (which is pretty low contrast these days, although it used to be the “standard” taught in film schools), how have I exposed it? If the key is T4 and the fill is T2, that would be a 4:1 ratio but that says nothing about whether I exposed the shot at T4 or at T2, or anything in between. I almost never expose a scene based on the “key” level: I prefer making flesh tones a little hotter or a little darker depending on what’s happening in the story or where I want people to focus their attention.

I think I’ll write an article on how to practice lighting by eye, but I’m going to save that for next week or the week after.

Meanwhile, if you want to see two very different lighting approaches used on very similar material, watch the original Star Wars (I think that’s now considered Episode 4) and The Empire Strikes Back. Star Wars was shot in the 1970s by an old-school DP who used a lot of classical hard lighting and there’s are a lot of hard shadows and obvious key lights. The Empire Strikes Back was shot with very, very large sources and looks like it could have been shot yesterday: even though the lights are generally very large and soft they are no less powerful at creating mood and a sense of space. The two films were shot only a few years apart but the lighting in Empire is timeless, whereas the other feels very dated and is a great example of the older “key fill back light” style.

Here’s the trailer for the original Star Wars:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1g3_CFmnU7k&feature=related

Here’s the trailer for The Empire Strikes Back:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vxLR_27ASpc&feature=related

The original Star Wars looks “lit” to me. Very little of it feels real or compelling. It’s completely adequate, but it doesn’t excite me.

The Empire Strikes Back’s lighting looks right to my eye: it’s rich but never feels inappropriate to the setting. Each setup is gorgeous but there’s no formulaic lighting here, only making each set look dazzling while remaining true to the story and the setting. Quite often the light sources are in the shot and you can feel them shape the space as people move past them.

(Man, those trailers look cheesy now. smile )

Rob: | December, 23, 2011

Thanks for the extensive answer. I watched the two trailers. The first seems like there are few deep blacks (except in space) while the second had more.

When you’re ready to teach that course, I’m ready to pay for it!

Art Adams: | December, 23, 2011

That’s part of it… I think the other part is to look at the quality of the shadows and the quality of the lights lighting the scene. The first has a lot of hard light from a distance, which tends to light things somewhat uniformly so that if you have a key side and fill side there’ll be two tones on the face, plus a scratch or backlight. In the second example the shadows are softer and there are a lot more tones in the image, not just a couple, and they change as people and things move through the environment. The light creates a sense of space or volume, whereas the first example the light does create some drama but doesn’t feel (to me, at least) like it’s part of the environment. The first feels lit, the second feels real—but still beautiful.

Gabriel de Bourg: | February, 03, 2012

Great article, as always. Your articles are always eye openers of how to think when it comes to lighting.

There’s also a quote here:
“When I was a camera assistant I worked a lot with a DP who lit a lot of scenes by putting foam core beneath the lens and bouncing light off of it. The result felt very natural and real, as if sunlight were coming through a window and bouncing off the floor.”

That DP was Dean Cundey! I’m a huge fan of his and have heard you mention him doing it in a lot of your articles (actually how I found them). But this one really showed the nice thing about doing it very in-depth.

To me, that sort of lighting would work great anywhere, because as you say it’s very natural. Most light we see in our everyday lives comes from above, often from ceiling-lights or the sun. The first idea I had was an indoor scene at a table in a diner, with a top down light placed on the actors and then small fill placed on the table. Without the fill (and with a hard sourde) you’d get Gordon Willis style Godfather lighting, but with a softer key (probably a Kino or very diffused light) and fill from the table you’d get a lovely look that would feel very real.

This way of filling is also very effective for outdoor use. Most of the time your key outside is the sun, which comes from above. Placing fill underneath is simple, quick and gives again a great, natural look.

Last but not least, the part where I really realized how much of Cundey’s lighting came from below? It was when watching Seinfeld, in an episode where Newman, Kramer and Elaine go to kidnap a dog. They were sitting in a car at night, with a lot of darkness when Wayne Knight (who is Dennis Nedry in Jurassic Park) light up a map with a flashlight, with the map held just below him. The light looked just like he did many times in JP!

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