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How to create studio lighting setup for these futuristic neon portraits [mildly NSFW]

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When you start using artificial lighting, it’s like a door to a whole new world opens up in front of you. There are so many different looks that you can achieve by just playing with the lights and their color, position, and intensity.

If you’d like to add some color to your portrait, gels are your “weapon of choice.” Mexican photographer Edgar Salgado gladly uses them in his work, and he shared with us his setup for two-colored portraits that look like they come from a future… Or a synthwave album.

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Lighting setup: Textured fashion lighting with coloured gels

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I spent many, many years working in a busy studio that focused on quantity over quality. As photographers working there, we did our best to push back against this where we could, but sometimes you only had 20-30 minutes with a client to achieve a handful of different looks and sadly this invariably led to you often reverting to the simplistic, yet professional looking white background shots out of necessity.

It was ultimately the repetitive nature of this white background work that spawned my gelled lighting that many of you know today. It really was a simple case of ‘shoot something different or go mad!’.

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Lighting setup: How to use colour gels outdoors

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You don’t often see photographers using gels outdoors in natural light, but why?

I think one of the core reasons you don’t see too many natural light gel shots, is that you need a lot of power and control from your lights to make gels visible in daylight. Whenever we’re outside during the daytime, sunlight has a tendency to creep in everywhere. Even when we’re standing in heavy shadow, there’s still a lot of light on us as the sun bounces around almost endlessly and sneaks into even the most shadowy areas. This is an issue for gels as bright, strong daylight will overpower and ruin a gel shot instantly, making the desired shot significantly harder to achieve over simply setting it up indoors.

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How to Avoid Colour Banding when using Coloured Gels

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Ever wondered why I’m so fussy about ‘clean’ lighting with my coloured gelled photography? Well it’s because failing to produce cleanly lit shots with gels, simultaneously produces horrendous looking shots with gels.

When I refer to clean lighting I’m referring to the fact that I like to keep all of my lights in my scene exactly where they’re supposed to be. If I have a background light then I have it lighting the background and nothing else, when I have a hair light, I have it lighting the hair and nothing else and so on. This might seem fairly obvious but when you’re using white-light and large modifiers like softboxes, the lighting is going everywhere whether you like it or not. We simply can’t get away with being that sloppy with coloured gels.

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Coloring shadows can make your photo, this is how you do it with gels

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Do you use gels to add color to your photos? Jay P. Morgan shows you four different ways to use them, but with a twist – he focuses on adding color only to the shadows. By using gels, he achieves the desired effect in camera. Some of these four methods can work for you too, and they’re great ways to minimize the time you spend editing the photos.

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How I made a quick and simple single light setup with colour

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It was a while ago now that I posted about using a single light to create a stunning beauty setup with only an additional reflector. At the time that article was shared and posted everywhere including all the big photo sites. In fact it seemed so popular at the time that the link I shared within the article that linked back to a cheap reflector sold nearly 60 of them in a couple of hours hahaha (if only I’d been selling reflectors that day ;) ). But if you missed it, here’s the basics; the setup requires a medium sized silver reflector with a lens sized hole in the middle of it and a large softbox…that’s it.

For the complete article and details please follow the link here, Simplest and most effective single single light setup I’ve ever used.

So now that you’ve read that and you now have your reflector with a hole in it, it’s now time to take it to the next level. As those that have been following my work for a while will know, it was only a matter of time before I added some colour to this technique and although this won’t blow you away with colour, it’s a subtle look that can certainly add a little more interest to a currently simple looking shot.

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