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Video Lighting Tutorial for Beginners
2K views
May 22, 2024
### Video Lighting Tutorial for Beginners In this tutorial, you'll learn the basics of lighting for video production, perfect for beginners. The video covers essential lighting concepts, including the importance of lighting in enhancing video quality, different types of lights (key light, fill light, and back light), and how to set up a three-point lighting system. You'll also get practical tips on choosing the right lighting equipment, positioning lights for optimal effects, and adjusting lighting to create different moods and atmospheres. Whether you're shooting with a smartphone or a professional camera, this tutorial will help you achieve professional-looking results.
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0:00
Welcome to our video lighting tutorial video
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So in this video I'm going to walk you through all the basics so you know how to light your video
0:05
Your subject looks great. So what we always talk about is the first, the most important thing is the sound, the
0:10
audio, then the lighting, and then your camera gear. So if you've got good audio in your videos, it's time to focus on the lighting
0:16
So the very basic lighting you hear people talk about all the time is called three-point lighting
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So you can see the diagram of what that looks like here. So you have the key light, you have the fill light, and then you have the back or the hair light
0:28
The back light is the main light that lights up the subject. The fill light fills in the shadows and the back or hair light does a good job of lighting
0:35
up kind of this side or one side of the back of the subject, which helps give it separation
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between the background. Show you what it looks like if I turn off the key light, which you can see here is this
0:45
is most of the lighting on me. Here that's back on. Now if we turn off the fill light, you're going to see this light does a good job lighting
0:52
up a good portion of my face, but there are strong shadows here
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And then after that, you see the back light or the hair light, which you can kind of see
1:03
along here the lighting, which allows you to basically notice more separation between
1:08
me and the bookshelf behind me. So now why don't we shut everything off and I'll show you what it looks like turning one
1:13
on at a time. Okay, so first let's turn on the back light
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And then next we'll turn on the fill light. And then here is the key light back on
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So this is the basics. So you understand three-point lighting now. Now it's time to break all the rules
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So why don't I show you what our videos normally look like, which don't include this fill light
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or the backlight. Okay, so here is our basic setup. We have the key light that didn't move
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What we use as a fill light before is now kind of a bluish color, which is point at
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the background and the small hair light is now behind the plant here
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This is how we like recording a lot of our videos. It's a bit more cinematic. You have more shadow on this side because there isn't that fill light
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But if you just have one main light source like this and you don't want quite as much
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of a shadow as we have right here, let me show you a couple of ways you could fix that. So the first thing is if you have some type of reflector like this, it's something that
2:03
comes with the silver here, the back of it is black. There's a couple of different uses you can have for this
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And so now if we take a look at if that's basically taking this light and reflecting
2:14
some of it back along my face, you should see that there's less shadow now than there
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was just a second ago. So that's one option. I don't know if you've seen some of our other videos, but basically one of the things, let
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me just, I'll record a video of it right now, is we have these two white sound blankets
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in front of me right here. And so for example, you could put one of those sound blankets right here and something white
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is also going to reflect some of this light back and fill in the side right here
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So you may not have tons of different lights, but you can just think about, hey, is there
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something I can bounce some of the light off with that helps fill in the side of my face
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Or maybe you could use it to fill in the background. You kind of have to get a little bit creative sometimes
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The next thing I want to talk about is how soft or harsh the light happens to be. So this light, as you can see, is I think around 30 some inches in diameter
3:01
And so this light with the diffusion panels, this right here, allows you to have a really
3:06
really soft light. The thing is, if you think about something like, you know, this other light that we have
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is about this big. So there's a big difference in size here. And so for example, if I turn this off and turn this on my face, you can see that it
3:20
lights up here and then there's zero light on this side of my face and it's really, really
3:24
bright here. So this is a much harsher light. And if you want to take that to the next level, think about the light source from your phone
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So this, this is, you know, a tiny little light. So how harsh is this light compared to this one
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So this is way too bright and this isn't as powerful light as this, but it's the source
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is so much bigger. And so what can happen if you have a light source like this is you don't want to shine
3:47
it directly on you, but what you can do again is the white sound blanks that you saw just
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a second ago. What if we bounce the light off of there? And all of a sudden we have a much softer light source hitting my face
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So you basically took something that was very, very concentrated and now it's basically bouncing
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off a huge white surface. So now my face is fairly well lit where this was way too much
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So another option is to pass. So this is basically this light here is there's a really strong, small light and it passes
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through two filters. So if we take this light again, this is one of the filters for this light
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So what we could do is something like this maybe. So I mean, it's not perfect, but you can tell after going through this cloth that it's not
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quite as harsh as it was just a second ago. So the next thing I want to show you is basically if you have this main key light, where you
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place it can obviously have a big effect on lighting your subject
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So right now it's at about 45 degrees from the camera and it's about 45 degrees above me
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And so let's take a look at what it looks like if it's directly beside me. OK, so you can see the light in the shot right now, but now there's basically no light or
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very little light on this side of my face, maybe a little bit from this light over here
5:00
And so you see a really strong division of, you know, the amount of light here and, you
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know, a really dark shadow on this side of the face. So this can be something that people may use in the movies is something for really, really
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dramatic scenes. But for an educational YouTube video, this isn't probably how we would light it
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OK, so here we are now with the light right above the camera. Let me show you what this looks like
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So here's the light and microphone. So this is used more for, say, beauty tutorials because my face is a little bit flatter
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The lighting is more consistent across my face. There's a couple of things here where it's not as dramatic of a look as having it obviously
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all the way off to one side. The one thing I could do here if I didn't want the shadow, say, under my nose or under
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my chin is that I put this lower. So if you think of ring light that kind of goes around the camera, you know, it's you're
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not going to have quite as many shadows as you do right now. But if there's something that you like, the flatness of this look, you can think about
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something like something white that if you put kind of just below you out of screen or
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you know, this cloth that I showed you a second ago. So with that below me, this light bounces off this and kind of fills in those shadows
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One of the other issues you're going to run in with this type of lighting is if you're using glasses
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So the light's hitting here and bouncing back to the camera where if it's at kind of off
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to the side at angles, that doesn't happen as much. But enough of this
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Let's get back to how we used to have it. Okay. So that's back to normal. But what do you think
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Did that give you a little bit better idea of how the light placement, the types of lights reflecting off of something
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There's a ton that you can do to get creative and get the look that you're looking for for
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your videos. If you want to learn more about how to improve your videos, we have a whole bunch of videos
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that help you with that. I'll link to the playlist right here. Hope to see you in those and future videos
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Bye bye