BEHIND THE SCENES

FRONT VIEW: The first step to this technique (and it’s a really important one) is to put your subject’s back toward the sun. We don’t want the sun to light our subject—we only want the flash to light them. So, the sun goes behind them. A nice bonus, depending on the angle, is that the sun can sometimes act as a back light, hair light, or kicker light.

SIDE VIEW: Once the sun is behind your subject, your job is to make them into a silhouette. The trick to doing that is to simply raise your f-stop, usually two or three stops, to darken the entire scene (here, I started at f/5.6 and raised it to f/9 because at that point, she was totally in shadows). The bonus is this makes the sky behind our subject darker and more dramatic.

BEHIND THE SCENES

SIDE VIEW: You can see I’m “hunched over” a bit in these shots (not a very flattering look for me). That’s because I’m trying to show more sky behind our subject, which is also why I’m using a wider lens than usual. The background is an important part of the shot, so to include more of it, I’m using a wide-angle lens.

BACK VIEW: If you could see behind that front diffuser on the softbox, you’d see an orange gel over the flash. It’s 1/2 cut of CTO (color temperature orange) gel because when you shoot outside like this, white light looks odd, especially at sunset. So, by placing a thin piece of orange gel over the front of the flash, it warms the light, which looks much more natural outdoors.

CAMERA SETTINGS

OTHER INFO

LENS:

Because the sky is such an important part of the shot, I switched to a Canon 24–70mm wideangle here to capture more of it. Heads up: when shooting portraits with a wide-angle, be sure to keep your subject’s hands, head, etc., away from the edges of the frame or those things will look larger and distorted.

GEL:

When shooting outdoors with flash, I put a thin (1/4 cut), orange (color temperature orange) gel over the flash (this Rogue gel attaches with an included thick rubber band), but as the sun gets lower in the sky, I double-up and use darker orange (1/2 cut) to make the light from the flash look more natural and match the surroundings.

BOOM ARM:

We mounted the flash on an Impact QuickStik+ Telescopic Handle, which makes it really easy to change the position of the light quickly when on location.

EDITING/RETOUCHING

This is probably the easiest retouch in the book because most of what we’ll be doing is adjusting the white balance to make the sunset more interesting. We’ll do a little tweaking of the exposure, some skin softening, and stuff like that, but pretty standard stuff for the most part since it’s mostly about adding color where we want it and eliminating it where we don’t.

STEP ONE:

Here’s our original RAW image in Lightroom's Develop module. Because we’re going to really boost the color of the sky here, along with the rest of the image, we don’t have to worry about choosing the Adobe Portrait RAW profile this time. So, you can just leave the Profile popup menu, at the top left of the Basic panel, set to Adobe Color (the default, as seen here).

STEP TWO:

Let’s make the entire image a little brighter and open up the shadows a bit, too (I don’t want the grassy area around her to look solid black). Start by increasing the Exposure slider almost a full stop (I went to +0.90, here), and then let’s open up the shadows a bit by dragging the Shadows slider over to +64. Besides just brightening the overall image, the key move we need to make here is to lower the highlights a lot—this is a trick I use often for skies to add more detail and dimension. So, drag the Highlights slider way over to the left (I went all the way down to –79). Look at what that does for the sun and the sky—it really makes a difference. Now we can bump the Contrast slider a little if we want (I dragged it over to +17 here).

STEP THREE:

Next, let’s tweak the overall color using the WB (white balance) sliders near the top of the Basic panel. Drag the Temp slider to the left quite a bit to add some blue into the sky, and then use the Tint slider to add some magenta, so we get kind of a “purpley” looking sky (as seen here). Here, I dragged the Temp slider over to 5,117 and the Tint slider to +76. Note: If you shot in JPEG, these numbers won’t apply, so just drag the sliders to around the approximate lengths you see here. When we’re doing creative white balance like this, we’re just moving the WB sliders to where it looks good, so don’t get hung up on the numbers—just get that sky way more interesting, color-wise, than it was.

STEP FOUR:

After applying those white balance tweaks, to me, our subject now looks a little “purpley” and pale to me, so maybe we should warm her back up a bit. That’s easy enough to do. Click on the Masking tool (Shift-W; the gray circle with the white dashes around it, in the toolbox beneath the histogram), and at the top of the panel of Masking tools, click on the Subject icon (as shown here) and a red tint overlay appears over our subject to let us know she’s masked.

STEP FIVE:

Now, go down to the adjustment sliders and drag the Temp slider over to the right to warm her back up a bit and remove some of the purple (here, I dragged it over to 12—just enough to add some warmth back to her that was lost from our white balance move). If you’re wondering why I didn’t just use the Masking feature to select the sky and only apply those white balance moves to the sky, it’s because then the water and the rest of the image wouldn’t have the same tone (I tried it—it looked weird, so I hit Command-Z [PC: Ctrl-Z] to Undo the mask).

STEP SIX:

Let’s add some skin softening now—not to actually soften her skin, but to smooth the gradations of color on her face. Just a small amount should do the trick. Click on Create New Mask at the top of the Masks panel, and then click on Select People in the pop-up menu. At the bottom of the panel, click on the Person thumbnail of our subject to bring up the panel of areas it can mask. Turn on the Face Skin checkbox (as shown here, bottom right), and it applies a mask to just the skin on her face, avoiding her lips, teeth and eyes (as seen here). Now, click the Create Mask button at the bottom right of the panel to apply the mask.

STEP SEVEN:

With just the skin on her face now masked, go down to the adjustment sliders and from the Effect pop-up menu at the top, choose Soften Skin (as seen here, bottom left) and it applies a skin softening effect. If you think the skin softening is too much (in this case, I do), you can reduce the amount by using the Amount slider that appears just below the pop-up menu. Here, I reduced the amount of softening to 48. Now, let’s do that all again, but this time, instead of softening the skin on her face, let’s brighten it. So, create another mask of just the skin on her face, and then drag the Exposure slider over to the right to 0.22.

STEP EIGHT:

Okay, as I’m evaluating how the photo looks now, I think that maybe it’s a bit too blue, and a little too bright, so let’s fix that. Click on the Edit icon (the first icon on the left in the toolbox) to return to the Basic panel, and then drag the Temp slider back a little toward yellow (I dragged it to 5,970) to warm it up a tad. Then, darken the overall exposure by dragging the Exposure slider to the left to +0.40 (so that we're just bumping up the exposure around half a stop rather than a full stop). This made the ground dark again, so you might want to increase the Shadows slider to around +83. If you think our subject looks a little too warm now, well… you know what to do (we did it back in Steps 4 and 5). But, that’s totally your call. If you’re going to do that, you might make her a touch brighter as well, by increasing the Exposure on her just a smidgen.

STEP NINE:

Two last things: sharpening and darkening the outside edges. To sharpen the image, go to the top of the Detail panel, to the Sharpening section, and increase the Amount slider to 80, then press-and-hold the Option (PC: Alt) key and clickand-hold on the Masking slider. Your image will turn solid white, which lets you know the entire image is being sharpened. While holding down the Option key, drag the Masking slider to the right until her skin areas turn solid black (I dragged it to 74), meaning they are no longer being sharpened. Finally, go to the Effects panel, and in the Post-Crop Vignetting section, drag the Amount slider to the left to –23 (this is farther than I would go for most images, but it looks right for this one).