Shooting skills of high-profile portraits

When controlling the exposure, most photos should be in the middle tone, less low-key (dark part) and more high-key (bright part). This is the most commonly used and safest exposure scheme.

However, in commercial portrait photography, you can often see high-profile photos that are completely inconsistent with the above exposure rules.

This kind of photos have high overall brightness, few shadows or even no existence. The whole photo is full of bright, cheerful and positive emotions.

If you look at the histogram of a high-profile photo, you can see that most of its tones are in the highlights, and even all of them are concentrated on the far right.

High-profile photos cater to people's subconscious love for light and can make the audience feel happy. They are widely used in commercial photography, especially portrait photography.

1. Advantages of high-profile portraits

As mentioned above, high-profile photos cater to the psychology of the audience and are easy to make people feel happy. And high-profile portraits have two important advantages.

The first advantage is that it can attract the audience's attention to dark and low-key areas such as hair, eyebrows and lips, while ignoring the tiny flaws on the characters' faces, such as a few light-colored acne.

Of course, if the subject has a pockmarked face or a few big moles, then don't take high-profile portraits.

High-profile portraits can effectively cover up tiny flaws on the face.

The second benefit is more obvious: a high-profile portrait can make people's skin look whiter.

If the character's skin is not white enough, you can use post-processing software to deal with it slightly, and use PS or LR to reduce the saturation of red and yellow skin.

Anyway, you don't have to take this photo to the photo contest, and you don't have to worry too much about being disqualified from winning the prize later. Taking good pictures of people is the most important thing, isn't it?

2. Composition principle

In high-profile portraits, white and light tones will occupy most of the picture, while black and dark tones will only occupy a small part, but this small part of dark color is the most expressive main part of the picture.

To some extent, high-profile portraits can be regarded as negative space composition: dark and low-key parts are the main body, and light and high-profile parts are negative space. (Click here to learn what negative space composition is)

Since high-profile portraits can be regarded as approximate negative space composition, the composition principles that high-profile portraits need to follow are slightly similar to negative space composition.

The most important thing to note is that the black low-key part of the picture should not be too much, otherwise the negative space is not "negative" enough, and the effect of negative space composition will not come out.

Looking from the outside, it is also an important measure to minimize the dark and low-key parts outside the main body of the picture.

Don't have too many dark objects in the background; People try to wear white and light-colored clothes to avoid distracting the audience from their eyebrows, eyes, lips and hair.

The dark clothes on the left seriously distract people from their faces. 3. Be careful of shadows.

When shooting high-profile portraits, we must pay attention to running out of light, adjust the position of the characters and avoid leaving shadows.

In high-profile portraits, shadows will be particularly obvious. If you leave too many shadows on the characters' faces, this high-profile portrait is undoubtedly a failure.

The following figure is a counterexample of not paying attention to controlling shadows.

In high-profile portraits, a little shadow will be obvious.

Therefore, when shooting high-profile portraits, large front light or scattered light is generally used to make the characters get uniform illumination; If possible, you can use auxiliary lights or reflectors to fill the light.

4. Slight side face

When taking high-profile photos, it is the best choice for people to keep facing the camera and face slightly.

This posture is not as easy to produce shadows as the side face, nor is it like facing the camera. The facial features look flat and big in the front light.

The frontal face is prone to flat facial features and a big face.

5. Exposure control

Don't overexpose, don't overexpose, don't overexpose. Important things should be said three times, and high-profile does not mean overexposure.

As mentioned earlier, a high-profile portrait is similar to the composition of negative space, and the white background accounts for most of the picture. If the white background is overexposed, the picture will be dazzling.

I will slightly increase the exposure of a high-profile photo. Let's see the effect.

The characters themselves are obvious, but most of the pictures are overexposed, which not only lacks details, but also is very, very dazzling and makes people feel uncomfortable.

The exposure control of high-profile portraits needs to be controlled to a certain extent, that is, the exposure value should be increased as much as possible to make the picture look more high-profile and bright, and the white part should not be overexposed.

It is recommended to use average metering, and then manually adjust ev appropriately. If your camera has a highlight warning function, turn it on without hesitation.

This function is simply designed for taking high-exposure photos. It can instantly display how many overexposed parts are in the picture on the LCD screen, which is convenient for us to adjust ev.

If your camera doesn't have a highlight warning function, take more photos under different EVs, and take the brightest one, but at the same time, don't overexpose the background and keep some details.

Try black and white.

High-profile portraits are one of the most suitable subjects for black and white shooting.

Many times, it is difficult for you to keep the background and clothes uniform white. After all, no one will decorate their home like a hospital ward.

In this background and clothes can not guarantee pure white, try black and white shooting, the effect will be much better.