Create Beautiful Portraits with Colorful Lights
Today I will share my latest photo session where I used colorful lights to create interesting effects to my portraits. Along with that, I will show exactly how I worked with these lights, the equipment and settings I used to take each photo and I will give you the best tips to create beautiful portraits with colorful lights.
All of the photos you are about to see were taken in my own house with the few colorful lights I have: The Aputure MC RGBWW, which is a very small, versatile, battery-powered led light I use A LOT for many of my portraits, both indoors and outdoors and my Philips Hue Play Bars, which are not battery powered, but that if you’re working indoors, can be great lights to create some colors to your photos and/or videos.
The first idea I had in mind was to try to place the Aputure light inside my washing machine to create a cool/crazy/colorful effect at the back of my head. My bathroom is pretty small, though, and I wouldn’t have much room to go crazy on angles. I tried a couple of different lenses but I ended up with my favourite lens for portraits, the 85mm f/1.8.
I added a purple tone to my Hue Play bars to create some colorful shadows to my face.
Even though I used colorful lights, I decided to still use my Godox SL60W along with my 90cm Newer Octabox as my main light simply because my intention was not to make the whole face colorful and I did not want to have much dark areas to the face either.
It’s a matter of intention: I wanted to keep my portraits very sharp, with as many details as possible to the face, I wanted to keep a natural skin tone with a colorful touch to it.
I will show you what you can do and how colorful you can get if you do not use a main source of light acting as a natural source of light in one of the photos coming ahead, though. That way you can get a little crazier with your ideas if you want!
I love using glasses and any reflective objects to photos where I use colorful lights in general because I can usually create interesting reflections to it, which in my opinion makes the portraits richer and more interesting in the end.
Since this is a self-portrait, I could not create the light leaks and overlays I wanted straight on camera and to fix that I used the LD app to add up some lights to the top of my photo (watch the video to see me use it).
The LD App is an easy to use app that will allow you to quickly add interesting effects to your photos.
This is the final result for the shot after the light overlay:
If you don’t want to use your phone or the LD app to do this, you can also just find a light leak or light overlay in Pixabay or in any stocks image website you like best, drop it over your photo in photoshop, hit “screen” and start working on your light overlay from there, but I will not go into details on that technique today because that was not was I used to make my photos for this photo session.
I thought this was going to be the coolest idea of all, but the truth is the washing machine door was considerably small and my head ended up kind of covering the greatest part of it. Not bad, but not exactly what I expected.
When you experiment with new things, it’s normal that you don’t always get the results you had in your head.
Then I decided to keep the same lights in different directions and try to use the bathroom’s towel heater as the background for some more portraits. Since it was a reflective surface, I thought it could create a modern, futuristic effect for them.
Notice that the original heater only had four bars. I added some more bars to it in Photoshop and in order to do that, I needed to take a photo of the background alone, with the focus locked on the same distance it was when I shot myself. I overlayed the background in Photoshop, positioning the lines where I wanted to fill the gaps and voilá.
Then I decided to go to the window and play with some reflections.
For the final result of this shot, I wanted to get some reflections of the window and once again I locked the focus at the exact distance it was when I had myself in frame in order for me to keep the same depth of field to the background and, with my phone, I started searching for the angle where I could get the reflections at the bottom of my photo (watch the video to see more details on how to do this).
The idea was to do an overlay of these images in Photoshop to get to the result I wanted but, again, if you’re not shooting yourself, if you’re shooting someone else, you can do this all in-camera and on the same photo, by holding the phone with one hand at the edge of your lens while you take the shot (watch the video to see me do it).
It will prevent you from having to work a little extra in post-production.
And, after the overlays, here is the result I got.
Then for the next shot, I wanted to create a mysterious mood. My living room is the largest space I have in my house and for that reason, I decided to play with the depth of field I had to make these shots.
I placed my Aputure light back there to create some bokeh, I already had the living room lamp showing from the angle I chose to shoot and I also placed the Hue Play Bar right at the back of my head to create a nice, colorful rim light separating me from the background.
Now, for this next photo, I decided to turn myself into an evil minion! Actually, it was not my intention, but it kinda happened…
I decided to play a little and show you what you can get if you choose to go ONLY with your colorful lights directed to your subject, not using a main source of light that keeps your natural skin tone.
I wanted to make a portrait of me through the mirror and I first chose to try a purple light directed to me.
If you use colorful lights only or if you point a strong colorful light straight to the subject’s face, you can absolutely change the skin tone to whatever color you want in your photoshoot.
It can be nice if that’s what you’re after.
I’m not a big fan of that though, unless there’s a cool concept behind it, which was not the case here.
So I changed the direction of my colorful light and the final shots I really liked out of this idea were these ones:
If you don’t have colorful lights but you have one or two speedlites, maybe you might prefer to use them instead of using led lights to make some colorful light portraits.
I bought these gels on Amazon.
I can choose the color I want for my photos, place them in front of the speedlight like this and achieve similar fun results with them.
I ended up not using this for this photoshoot because it is much easier for me to use continuous lights when I shoot self portraits, as I can use my phone as a monitor and see exactly where the light is hitting and how the photo looks before actually shooting, while when I use flashlights, I need to shoot, adapt settings, shoot, adapt some more, shoot, change the light direction and so on…
it takes a lot of going back and forth.
But it is a perfect option if you’re shooting somebody else.
This photo has been done only with two speedlites with the gels in front of them.
For the last shots I wanted to try two ideas in my bedroom.
For the first one I would be reading a book and have some lights coming out of it and from behind it.
Again, I used the exact same light combo I used for the other photos.
And then I grabbed these other lights I bought a while ago to shoot my music video and decided to try to create depth with them.
The point is, it was not very easy to shoot and to be shot using this idea.
I taped the lights to the lens to try to create the effect I wanted, but I still struggled with it and, even though this was not the exact result I had in mind, I think it ended up being a decent portrait. What do you think?
Again, if you’re shooting someone else or if you have someone to hold the lights for you, this idea will be much easier, as you can bring the lights closer or further from your subject in a way it will create the most interesting bokeh you could get with the lights in different distances.
CAN YOU ACHIEVE SIMILAR RESULTS OUTDOORS?
If you don’t have a softbox with a continuous light like the one I use for my photos, don’t worry. You can achieve similar results if you shoot close to a window or if you shoot outdoors taking one or two Aputure lights. The next photo was done outdoors only with the Aputure light.
If you want to have very colorful skin tones, you might even prefer not to use a softbox anyway.
Either way, if you want to check out any of the equipment I used for these photos, not only the lights, but the lenses, camera, the colorful gels and anything else, I will leave the list for all of it bellow.
I did not talk about my editing process on this video, but if you want to learn how to edit like I do, I have a video where I explain in detail all I do to edit my portrait shots.
If you want to simplify your editing workflow and still have rich, beautiful colors and a vibe to your photos that is similar to mine, I recently released my first Lightroom Presets Collection that might be something interesting for you! It was carefully created to help me to save time and quickly create awesome edits for my portraits and it is something I finally decided to share with you.
I hope you enjoyed this post, guys. Thanks so much for reading me and, I will see you in the next one! Tchau!
THE GEAR I USED FOR THIS PHOTOSHOOT:
MAIN CAMERA I USE: https://geni.us/oj3jBYb
MY FAV LENS FOR PORTRAITS: https://geni.us/4xte
BUDGET & WIDER LENS OPTION: https://geni.us/H0XEQqe
THE LENS I USED AT THE SUBWAY: https://geni.us/3UfKGNg
GODOX SL60W: https://geni.us/ZSooax
OCTABOX: https://geni.us/7ZGtdhE
APUTURE MC RGBWW LIGHT: https://geni.us/jIyQbGd
PHILIPS HUE PLAY BAR: https://geni.us/F5KAng1
BUDGET TRIPOD I USE: https://geni.us/UT7hf23
LENS DISTORTION APP: https://tinyurl.com/5e26rpfh
CAMERA CONNECT APP: https://tinyurl.com/35e72x3n
