LOW KEY NEWMAN, HANSEN, COLLINS, PHILLIPS, LEE, THOUGHTS ON LOW KEY PORTRAITURE

What goes around come around! For quite a few years we have seen a preponderance of stylish high key, dreamy images and have indeed published a couple of articles on the subject ourselves. Low key seems to be on the way back at the moment and so it is timely to look at the technique and its methods.

What is Low Key?

Quite simply put, low key is a description of an image, which contains a higher proportion of dark tones than light tones. Take this issue's cover image. If you open the original image in Photoshop and look at the histogram of the luminance channel you see that the average RGB value RGB is just 46 points. Using the colour range to select just the highlights confirms that these light tone occupy just 1% of the pixels. However, what an important 1% they are, containing the entire facial details, the hands and defining the folds of the satin dress!

Old Masters

The painting of the Old Master such as Rembrandt were often made in low key.T here are a number of reasons for this, but one was to overcome the limitations of pigments available at the time. In order to make the face of the subject bright and glowing one dodge is to surround it by darker colours so that they eye is fooled. Perhaps the archetypal examples of this are the painting of the Christ child in the manager, glowing out of the cot as if lit by a snooted Bowens! What the artist are doing here is shaping the passage of the viewer's eye towards the important part of their picture. There is a lesson here for the low-key photographer. You can have you subject's face slightly darker and more saturated if you are going to surround it by a dark background .The eye will then bring up the value - an effect known as simultaneous contrast.

This is one reason why we asked Terry Hansen to look at light meters for this compilation article. Getting controlled lighting is the key to achieving the correct fell to the image. Light meters have got a little left behind in these digital days but for setting up and balancing lights they are indispensable

How dark can you go? Low Key

Especially if you are outputting to inkjet, you need to know how dark your tones are going to reproduce. A slight disadvantage of fully colour managed and profiled workflows are that the shadows below 30 RGB points are sometimes blocked up by the profile. If you find the deepest shadow on your image and then click your shadow dropper on this you will force that shadow area all the way down 0 RGB points and possibly take detail away form the surrounding areas. Providing you know just where shadow blocking is gong to occur you can set your default low RGB value higher or tweak your tone curve to accommodate your profile characteristics. We showed you how to correct this I our feature on colour control last year but in a nutshell you lift the darkest tones in which you require detail above the point at which they block out. To find this point you make a graduated grey scale using the gradient tool then posterise it into about 30 steps and print it. Then you look at where you can no longer differentiate the black tones and go back to your computer and measure the RGB values using your dropper and the Info Palette. If you find that that point is 40RGB points then you now know that all values below that will print as featureless black.

If you are looking for more sophistication, you can overlay numbers on your target and see if you can read them in your proposed viewing or display conditions. see image). As we illustrated in the feature on varnishes in paper Chase this issue, applying a varnish bring out shadow detail in a spectacular way and your tests should include the application of a varnish if that is what you propose to do. Expect to get at least another stop of tone at the dark end of the scale.

Note: In general the use of the Look Up Tables (LUT) when printing on an Epson printer is less likely to block up your shadows. You get this when using the "Automatic" setting without bespoke colour profiles. It may work better for you so at least give it a try.

Setting up Your Lights

For some reason, today's textbooks tend to fight shy of writing about lighting and lighting ratios - typical of today's dumbing down! Make no mistake, a practical or practical and theoretical knowledge of lighting set ups can take you a long way. There are a number of fundamentals that you should understand about lights.

Inverse Square Law

The amount of light reaching a subject falls off as the subject is moved away form the light. If the distance is doubled, the light falls off by four times (i.e. 2 stops). This holds true for brollies, soft boxes and other diffused light sources. Very directional lighting such as that from the sun or a projector does not fall off. This is because the light rays are parallel to each other. For the case of the sun it is because it is so far away, for the projector it is because the lens optics make it behave as though it is far away.

Size of the light source

Pinpoint light sources such as the sun or a small flash head are tiny relative to the objects they usually light up. It is all about relative size. To a bee shot in macro, a bare camera flash head is about the same size as a brolly to a human being. The lighting effect is thus the same. On an overcast day the sunlight is spread over the entire sky and is effectively the biggest brolly you can buy! If you place a large soft box very close to a subject the light wraps around them. This is referred to as the depth of the lighting. The effect is explained in the separate diagram. The effect is to increase the modelling and shape of the face.

Low key Low Key

15 inch working distance is 2:1 along the depth of the face whereas if the working distance of the lamp is moved out to 8 feet the ratio moves to 1.1:1 that is a barely detectable change.

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