How To: Artificial Intelligence Lighting

6/04/2017 ISO 1200 Magazine 0 Comments

Ring Lights, a super popular way of doing portrait lighting, is to create a ring of light around the camera lens — this is also the same principle used for many mirrors. The light falls evenly on the face, without any strong shadows, smoothing out the skin, and gently getting darker around the edges of the face.

The only trade off is if you look closely the model always has a strange circle reflection in the eyes (especially the closer the light is to the face). For this reason they went with the artificial intelligence theme, nicely lite but with something amiss.

To further create the mood, they built their ring light with daylight colored LEDs, which give a more bluish tone. You can correct for this in camera with the white balance, but cheap LEDs are often not color accurate and in this case overly blue.

There are endless DIY tutorials for ring lights, The Lighting Channel is definitely on the simple side. Things to keep in mind: the bigger the ring the nicer the light but also the bigger the reflections, and everything is nicer with diffusion.

About The Lighting Channel:

The Lighting Channel is a video platform dedicated to inspiring and empowering people to design their world through light. We provide creative solutions to basic lighting needs by focusing on atmosphere, mood, space-shaping and different uses of material.