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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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How to shoot a clean and simple coloured fill portrait in the studio

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Sometimes you just want a clean and quick setup to start a shoot off the right way. Sure, you may have a ton of creative ideas in store for later on in the day, but they may be new ideas you’ve never tried before or they may be more experimental. If that’s the case, I always find it smart to start a shoot with a tried and true setup that’s not too tricky to do, quick to set up and provides great shots each and every time.

That way, the team knows that whatever happens from here on out with the more experimental work, we’ve already bagged some killer images and everybody is positive about the setups to come.

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Create this amazing colourful effect entirely in camera using just 3 lights and gels

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How do you make white light? No, that isn’t a trick question. Most of us are fairly familiar with using different colour temperatures and even playing around with gels but if you get a little bit creative you can use gels and lighting to make some really interesting effects.

Commercial photographer Ron Hautau created these dynamic portraits using a relatively simple set-up and some basic physics. So how did he do it? We caught up with Ron to find out how.

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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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Create magic with this 3 light gelled portrait set-up

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Studio photography can be so creative. All you need is a subject and a light. But after you’ve mastered one light, the possibilities are endless. Ohio-based fashion photographer Ron Hautau created this striking series of coloured portraits using nothing more than a black background, 3 lights and some coloured gels. He explained to DIYP how he did it.

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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 fake that gelled split lighting look in Photoshop

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Using multiple differently coloured gels to light your subject and their environment has become a very popular subject over the last few years – and I’m totally not blaming Jake Hicks – but it’s not always possible to easily do in the studio. Perhaps you don’t have the colours of gel that you need. Or maybe there’s just too much colour spill to effectively get what you’re after.

It is possible to simulate the look of using coloured gels in post, though, thanks to Photoshop. And in this video, Unmesh at PiXimperfect shows us how. There are several ways you can do this, but the method Unmesh shows in the video is very effective and covers a bunch of different techniques that you can apply to a lot of other tasks, too.

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The must have tool for color addicts – the Rosco MixBook

Color.  Such an important tool to help bring a time, place, or even emotions into an image.  Wouldn’t it be nice to have something that makes working with color easier? Inside this little package is a new tool by Rosco called “Mixbook“. To help creators pre-visualize gel and LED colors.

Essentially Rosco has digitized the old gel swatch books, as you can see in my reenactment of a Rosco scientist at work. Note the old gels from my swatch book flying around as the new Mixbook arises from the smokey pot.

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Watch how to create the split-lighting coloured gel look in Photoshop

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The two-tone gelled split-lighting look is quite popular for portraits and fashion photography. Thanks to photographers like Jake Hicks, there are lots of tutorials out there on how to create this look in-camera. But what if you don’t have the gels? Or didn’t even think about trying to gel it during the time of the shoot but you’d like to try to create that look in post?

Well, Jesús Ramirez at the Photoshop Training Channel has just the tutorial for you. In this video, he shows us how to easily create the look in Photoshop using gradient maps, blending modes and masks. And as usual, he throws a lot of other tips and tricks in between.

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How to create lighting gradients in your shots with coloured gels

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Using coloured gels can be a little unforgiving, especially if you’re new to using strobes. But one of the biggest reasons using gels can be tricky, is due to how hard it can be to use multiple coloured gels in the same setup. Coloured lights do not play well together and unlike paint, where you can create new and wonderful colours by mixing them, mixing coloured light often results in dull, washed-out colours. Coloured gels do not mix and consequently must ordinarily be kept separate in your shot at all times.

Thankfully though, in today’s setup, I will be showing you how to mix coloured gels with incredible ease, in fact, it’s so easy, we’ll only be using one light to do it!

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