Photomag competition - Tutorial Tuesday

Low Key Studio Lighting Setup And A Halloween Gif in 13 Frames

Low key refers to a setup of two light sources, positioned at about 45 degree angles (those may vary so much...) to the back and to both sides of your model or object. Also, slightly lower than what you're shooting.

The point is to illuminate the sides and leave the front underexposed so that you get only contours. The background should also fade to darkness.

Sounds simple enough but when you try it you may get discouraged by your results.

'It doesn't work!' Meaning your background and front are not dark enough.

Well, good results in my experience were planned to come with some post editing. First of all low key photography is mostly intended to be viewed in B&W.

Then you just have to bring up the blacks and maybe slightly the whites of your image in your editor. But mostly the blacks. Don't be afraid to go drastic. Histograms are not important, go darker than usual and only depend on your eyes and aesthetic sense.

For the gif below I saved a few different versions, as many as 13 (counting the colorful and the overexposed looking images which I did not use later) going slightly darker every time.

I used Photoshop CS6, opening the Window>Timeline function and adding each image to a single line. After I got to the darkest one, I arraneg the others once more after it, but symmetrically, and without adding the first one again. Like this:

1, 2, 3... 11, 12, 13, 12, 11... 3, 2

I set each frame's time value to No Delay (to slow down you could use 0.1 seconds). Then - Repeat Forever. And finally - Save for the Web as a gif file.

Enjoy!

P.S. If you leave any questions in the comments I could answer them as soon as I am back online. Which will be less often in the few days to follow but after that... Well, I'll be back.