GPose Tips: Portrait Photography
Let's put our Warriors of Light front and center by borrowing some IRL photograph techniques, and adapting them to gpose!
From Wikipedia: "Portrait photography, or portraiture, is a type of photography aimed toward capturing the personality of a person or group of people by using effective lighting, backdrops, and poses."
Given the nature of this theme, we'll be relying heavily on facial expressions. If you want to learn more about how to use the gpose tools for that, check out this guide on Facial Expressions.
While backgrounds can help tell the tale, we want minimal distractions.
We can do this by choosing neutral backgrounds or negating a rich background by diffusing it.
We can also draw attention to the subject by creating strong contrast zones that detach the focus from the background. In this example, the soft blue and the medium yellow sources contribute to the contrast with rim light zones:
Being the focus of portrait shots, the subject's expression is front and center. And no element brings more attention than the eyes:
We'll touch on the concept to explain one of the most commonly used composition setups. We'll use the three Point Lights available under Lighting Settings.
Key Light: gives shape to and emphasizes features;
Fill Light: placed opposite the key light, creates a counterpart to it;
Back Light: helps delineate hair and headpieces.
Keep in mind that the Three-Point Lighting setup is not a mandatory rule. Feel free to play around with placement and intensity; I often use the 3 Point Lights to enhance environmental light sources, for example:
Another option I often use is the Butterfly setup. With two light sources (a key light placed top-front, and a fill light placed bottom-front) it creates a very clear delineation with sharp features.
Slight variations in camera angle can bring completely different shadow areas and focus; give it a try, and you may land in unexpectedly nice shots:
With these hints in mind, let's pick some compositions apart!
This one, for example - Strong DoF negates details, and environmental light gives emphasis to the character's face:
DoF again, with two layers of diffusion (the bookshelf and the background), with environmental light providing contrast zones:
Did I mention DoF? Yes, let's use some strong DoF to detach the character, and enhanced natural light to pop the features.
By now you may have noticed that I use these tips a lot: for example, most of my 'poster' and Eorzea Collection shots rely heavily on these tips.
Give it a try, and share your results!
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