Tutorial Creating diffused specular highlights

Garry Edwards · 1 Feb 2020

Marcel submitted a new resource:

Creating diffused specular highlights - A guide to dealing with specular highlights, by Garry Edwards

A specular reflection is a reflection of a light source, for example the catch lights in the eyes are specular reflections and we see them in nearly all of our people shots. People often refer to specular reflections as ‘sparkle’ when they like them and ‘glare’ when they don’t… Glare is usually something photographers try to avoid because excessive glare is distracting and obscures surface detail.
It’s nearly impossible to completely avoid specular reflections, although quite...

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Nostromo · 3 Feb 2020

Thanks for posting this, it did help me with a little still life I did on Sunday. Although I couldn't get my soft box directly above my set up (I don't have the equipment for that at the moment), I did manage to keep the specular highlights to a minimum, by getting the soft box as much as I could over the top and as close as possible, without being In the shot. It's not a spectacular piece of work, but it's something I can work on

Garry Edwards · 3 Feb 2020

Nostromo said:
Thanks for posting this, it did help me with a little still life I did on Sunday. Although I couldn't get my soft box directly above my set up (I don't have the equipment for that at the moment), I did manage to keep the specular highlights to a minimum, by getting the soft box as much as I could over the top and as close as possible, without being In the shot. It's not a spectacular piece of work, but it's something I can work on

A professional will always have the equipment needed, for example a boom arm to get the light in the right place, but as long as you understand the principles it's usually possible to bodge.

For example you can usually manage with a light stand at the most acute angle possible if you can put the subject on a base that can be tilted to compensate for the limited angle of the lighting stand.

At worst, you may need to clone out the light stand.