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Filed under: Cameras •Lighting •Post Production •Production •Training •

Lighting Simply for the RED

This shot was lit very simply, by bouncing a 575w PAR into the hardwood floor just to the right of the shot. Light from below feels like ambient light to me, and the feel of this shot is that sunlight is striking the floor just outside of frame.

Here’s the original shot, brought in from RedCine with minimal correction:

Here’s the shot with some basic color correction, setting the pedestal, gamma and gain using Magic Bullet Looks:

The plant looks a bit down to me. At the time it looked okay but now… it needs a little pop. Initially I tried using Looks’ spot exposure adjustment, creating a round feathered pool of increased exposure around the plant, but that just didn’t look right. Instead I decided to use a “negative ND grad.”

An ND grad knocks down the exposure in half of the frame and then blends back to normal exposure in the other half. If you look at an ND grad the top, or one side, will look dark and the bottom, or opposite side, will appear clear. The dark feathers to clear in the middle of the filter to hide the area of transition. Magic Bullet Looks has a digital ND grad that emulates this affect as long as nothing in the affected area is clipped. (Clipped highlights turn gray when darkened and look very much like dark clipped highlights—or, in film terms, “a mistake”.) In this case, though, I wanted to do the opposite: I wanted to increase exposure in one part of the frame and have a transition to normal exposure in the rest. So I set the digital grad in Magic Bullet Looks so that it darkened the left side of the frame… and then I entered a negative value for the grad. That lightened up the area I’d just darkened:

This worked very nicely. The effect is completely hidden.

One other trick: the beam in the ceiling in the background on the far right was really bright due to reflected sunlight from outside, so I used a polarizing filter to reduce the shine and make it less bright.

If you haven’t eaten yet you’ll love this next setup…

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