hollywood promotional portraiture

Hollywood promotional portraits where used to created interest in a actor or actress during the golden age of Hollywood. The characteristics of these portraits had hard blow out shadows and highlights to create a interesting dramatic contrast. This was contrasted with soft focus drawing your attention to facial features.

Posing the model interesting angles where used to try and differentiate and make their portrait standout.

This image of Lauren Bacall is a prime example of this lighting style. It stood out for me due the use of a shallow depth of fields and the contrasting lines with in the robe jawline and shadow cast on the background.

To recreate this image I will start by setting up a red head to the left of the model high up to get he butterfly lighting effect as well as the highlights with in the hair. This has been stopped up to blow out the skin

A second light can be used to create the detail on the background but this may have ]to be created separately and applied in post due to the over head position of the light.

I started the shoot by setting up the camera and model, this allowed me to position the lighting knowing the framing would be correct. the key light was set up to left of the camera. as these are constant light i could see its effects as i set up the light. 

as we didn't have a boom to position the rear light above head i could not create the same background positioning it to the side created a similar detail but i could not achieve the blown out white intensity that was present in the original.

once I have my image I started by applying a crop of 8x10 to replicate that of the large format. in Photoshop.

I then in the black and white panel altered the tones of the image to resemble that of the original, there is a lot of contrast yet little detail held with in the flesh tones suggesting the image is slightly over exposed. As I over exposed this while shooting I altered used the tone sliders to adjust the feel of the skin, starting by upping the whites to give a nice glow for the skin tones. I used the clarity to smooth out the skin removing contrast in the mid-tones and then added contrast to put depth back in to the image occurring for reducing the clarity. 

To make Karens hair stand out similar to the Lauren Bacall's I have used the brush adjustment and reduced the shadows, this is a subtle adjustment to compensate of the darker hair type. 

I next moved the image into Photoshop, I did this in colour as Photoshop has gives you more control over how your b and w images will come out.

In photoshop i started by applying a gradient map this gave me a much stronger contrast between the black and white tones with in the image, to replicate the soft feel of the original image i used a Gaussian blur applied to a copy of the original image and then used a faint brush on a black layer mask to reveal the smoother tones.

Now when I compared this image next to the original it didn't quite work for me; The key lighting was right with the shadows casting at a similar angle. There could be more fill light on the hair but I feel this is simply darker due to Karan having black hair a and the original has deep shadows in this area. The skin tone has more of a grey tone to it this could be because of my use of over exposing or simply Bacall has a different tone of skin.

The thing that wasn't working for me was the depth of field, I shot the original image ƒ/1.8 but the use of a prime lens has left me with a relevantly sharp image. on close inspection the original looks to have the blur applied by other means;

This area suggests that an alternative process has been used to achieve the shallow DOF even if the hair had been protruding form the face on a different plane in a quiff style  the scalp is also blurred while the back of the head is sharp.

To rectify this I merged copied the background and skin smoothing layer to create a duplicate I could apply a field blur too, i chose to used this method as it would allow me to alter the intercity of the blur while having th different levels of blu merge together seamlessly. where i felt the blur was too much i used the layer mask and brush to remove it.

As an attempt to rectify the skin toning I changed the gradient map form black to white to black to grey this in tern gave me the grey tones while leaving the total image dull. so to rectify this i added a exposure layer which brought up the brightness again and leaving more greys in the mid tones.

This gave me the idea to use the same technique on the background to boost the whites. i created another gradient map and paired it with a exposure adjustment layer then masked out the facial area. 

 This project was fun, having to reverse engineer a shoot shows a knowledge of how things are achieve, its something I hope to do again to put myself. while i happy with my key lighting and the background was a case of not having the correct lighting stands and limitations of the project had we been able to use speed lights this could have easily been achieved. I need to work on my direction and detail, while Karen was a good model i could have payed more attention to the little details such as how tight the robe was and brought the back shoulder round to match the original.