Low Key Photography and Postprocessing with Photoshop

Low-key portraits and the low key lightning are a challenging technology task for the beginner as well as for the professional. Its a really simple technique which brings immediately drama to an image but to master it can drive you crazy.

This is an experiment about LowKey LowTech Low Budget Photography. I tried to make a high quality Low Key Image with as less equipment as possible.

What is a low-key photography:

Low-key photography is a style of lighting and its dominated by the dark tones and colours.
The main characters of low-key Photography are:

• deep shadows but there are still little details in the dark tones.
• underexposure
• grazing light
• less but strong contrasts
• mostly one light source

and if you use a Digital Camera (like the most of us) you should definitely in RAW format. If you use the JPG format the chance is hight that in the dark parts of the image are JPG fragments.

This image is made with a really simple just a silver umbrella nearly full folded to lead the light directly to the subject.
The flash is a Canon 430 EX connected to the Camera 5D MII with a ETTL cable.
The flash power is set to half. Camera settings f18, 1/160 Shutterspeed, ISO 400 – 640:

And heres the setup:

On this setup you can see how it was done the camera and the flash is at an angle of 90 degree the model looks straight to the camera.
So the light of the flash hits only as grazing light the model and gives that dramatic look.

Postprocessing:

The Postprocessing was done in Camara Raw, Photoshop and Topaz Restyle.

This is the image straight out of the camera:

The Postprocessing of the Image is not that difficult as well. First i made some level corrections.

First Level Correction to light up the dark parts on the lighten side of the model:

The second Level Correction is to darken the dark parts a little bit more.

The third Level Correction is to get more contrast.

The next step was to copy the image and the fill method was set to soft-light with a correction BlackWhite Layer set as Cut Mask

In the next step i used a Hue & Saturation Correction layer and i adjusted the Red Levels to get rid of the strong red tones.

Now comes the semi dual tone effect. I used a Black & White Correction Layer with a mask and a Opacity of 60%.

And for the final step i used Topaz-Restyle but i used only 50% opacity

This is my way to make a normal looking Low-Key image into a awesome looking one. Just spend a little time on your images.

May the Force and Adobe Photoshop be with you.